PayPal to Cut Its Workforce By 7% Firing 2,000 Employees

This Tuesday, PayPal announced it is joining a veritable legion of tech firms that initiated mass layoffs this January. The firm is revealed it is planning to fire around 2,000 employees—amounting to 7% of its workforce—as a part of its broader effort to reduce costs.

PayPal Cutting Staff by 7% But Will Continue to Hire “Strategically”

On Tuesday, PayPal shared a message sent to PayPal employees by the firm’s president and CEO Dan Schumer. According to the message, PayPal will reduce its workforce by around 2,000 employees—7% of its total workforce. The layoffs will be carried out over the next few weeks. 

According to the release, management will inform individual teams and units within the firm of the exact impact the decision will have on them. The firm also promised to treat its departing employees with “respect and empathy” and announced they would receive “generous packages” and support, although it did not provide any specific information.

Addressing these changes requires us to make hard decisions that will impact some of our colleagues. Today, I’m writing to share the difficult news that we will be reducing our global workforce by approximately 2,000 full time employees, which is about 7% of our total workforce. These reductions will occur over the coming weeks, with some organizations impacted more than others. We will treat our departing colleagues with the utmost respect and empathy, provide them with generous packages, engage in consultation where required, and support them with their transitions. I want to express my personal appreciation for the meaningful contributions they have made to PayPal.

The company stated the layoffs are a part of the ongoing effort to reshape the current “challenging macro-economic environment”. According to the message, the effort has already been successful in many ways but requires more work. Another report from Tuesday indicated that PayPal has plans to continue “strategic” hiring throughout 2023, despite today’s layoffs.

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Around 60,000 Tech Employees Already Fired in 2023

In its first 10 days, 2023 saw 22 times more layoffs than the start of 2022 and, by January 27th, US-based tech companies have laid off around 58,000 employees since the beginning of the year. The onslaught of announcements on staff-cutting comes after a year that saw the profits and share prices of many technology giants slaughtered with Google’s stock being down 32% in the last 365 days, and Meta’s 52%.

Late last year, Elon Musk’s firing spree after the Twitter takeover which saw about 50% of the workforce—and several executives including the platform’s head of crypto—laid off signalized the start of the trend. In November, it was joined by another social media platform when Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announced it would fire 11,000. This year, mid-January brought the greatest volume of layoffs since in a span of a few days, Amazon announced it would reduce its staff by 18,000, Alphabet by 12,000, and Microsoft by 10,000.

It is, however, interesting to note that despite the onslaught of layoffs, the tech industry still has significantly more employees than before the covid-19 pandemic. This is, in large part, due to a hiring spree that resulted from record profits in 2020 and mostly occurred in 2021 and early 2022.

Do you think tech layoffs will ease in February? Let us know in the comments below.