Yahoo announced today that it is laying off 16,000 employees, or 20% of its workforce, to join a long list of Silicon Valley companies that have taken similar action since the start of the year, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal and Amazon. . and others.
On Thursday, 1,000 employees received layoffs, with the rest set to take place over the next few months.
In a statement to Axios, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzon said the layoffs were not due to economic hardship but rather a change in company strategy aimed at rebalancing the unprofitable company, while also making it clear that there are no plans to make companies exit the advertising market. in full. .
Yahoo added that it plans to improve parts of its service to advertisers, including its platform that automatically buys ads to deliver them to a variety of publishers. The company also confirmed that despite losses in its ad unit overall, it was still profitable as it reported $8 billion in revenue last year.
Likewise, Microsoft-owned GitHub said it would lay off 10% of its 3,000 employees and close all offices to fully comply with the remote work system.
GitHub is the largest source code hosting service for developers and businesses that hundreds of thousands of companies around the world rely on to store their software and has more than 100 million users. Microsoft bought the company for $7.5 billion in 2018, but GitHub has been operating as a separate company since then.
The new layoffs come amid a wave of mass layoffs from big tech companies recently, which analysts say is being driven by soaring inflation in global markets amid fears the market could slip into recession in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. An increase in employment. prominent.
Major companies around the world have laid off 5-7% of their workforce, with Amazon announcing 18,000 layoffs earlier this year, followed by Microsoft with 10,000 layoffs, Alphabet with 12,000 layoffs, and Twitter with 7,500 layoffs. employees and PayPal with 2,000 employees.