The layoffs across the tech industry have continued this week, with cuts from Amazon and battery recycling company Redwood Materials. So far this year, there have been over 96,000 layoffs in tech, according to data from Trueup. The layoffs seem to be moving at a faster rate than last year — over 245,000 workers in tech were let go in 2025.

In March alone, more than 38,000 employees were let go from their jobs across tech, including companies like Oracle, Eidos Montreal, Meta and Epic Games. (The video game industry continues to be particularly hard hit.) At least four of the companies below have laid off employees due to increased spending in AI.

We'll get into the reason for the layoffs below. Note that while this report currently starts in late March 2026, we may backfill news from earlier in the year in a future update. 

April 2026

Amazon

Amazon is planning to temporarily close a warehouse in Homestead, Florida, which will eliminate more than 600 jobs, Newsweek reports. The job cuts will start in July and continue through September but the giant company is giving employees the option to relocate to other facilities. The warehouse has only been open for just under two years but Amazon is already looking to update the site.

Redwood Materials

Battery recycling company Redwood Materials laid off 10% of its employees, totaling 135 people, TechCrunch reports. Those who were let go received an email from the chief HR officer telling them the layoffs were made “to sharpen our focus, our work and the size of our teams to support the direction Redwood is going in the future.”

Snap

Snap is laying off 1,000 workers, which is 16% of its staff, Variety reports. The Snapchat parent company made the announcement just weeks after Irenic Capital Management asked the company to make changes to improve performance and revenue.

Snap is using AI to streamline operations and assist the now smaller workforce. “We have already witnessed small squads leveraging AI tools to drive meaningful progress across several important initiatives,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said.

Disney

Just two months after taking over as CEO of Disney, Josh D’Amaro announced the company is laying off 1,000 of its employees, AP News reports. In addition, Marvel let 8% of its staff go after the call was made.

“Over the past several months, we have looked at ways in which we can streamline our operations in various parts of the company to ensure we deliver the world-class creativity and innovation our fans value and expect from Disney,” D'Amaro said in a memo to employees. “Given the fast-moving pace of our industries, this requires us to constantly assess how to foster a more agile and technologically-enabled workforce to meet tomorrow’s needs.”

GoPro

The wearable camera maker this year will eliminate 145 employees due to a restructuring plan to cut costs, the Wall Street Journal reported. The cuts are expected to last until the end of the year.

Vimeo

Vimeo is going through its third round of layoffs since it was acquired by Bending Spoons. This time, the company let go of more than 120 people, which is about 25% of its city staff.

Meta

It’s been reported that 200 Meta employees in the Bay Area will lose their jobs at the end of May. That includes 124 employees in Burlingame and 74 in Sunnyvale. The company last laid off workers just a few weeks ago.

March 2026 

Oracle

Oracle has begun implementing a big cull of its employee base. On the final day of March, more than a dozen Oracle employees announced on LinkedIn they had been let go from their jobs, Business Insider reports. It's unclear at this time how many workers were affected, but it was projected to be thousands at the start of this month.

Those laid off received the same email: "After careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change."

The job cuts are reportedly to help Oracle stem a cash drain related its expenditures on AI infrastructure.

Eidos Montréal

Deux Ex studio Eidos Montréal announced on March 30 that it's laying off 124 people. In response, the studio head David Anfossi has decided to leave the company.

The cuts are a result of "changing project needs and impacts across production and support teams," the gaming company said in a LinkedIn post. It also noted that the decision to lay off these employees is not related to their talent or performance. 

T-Mobile

After already having layoffs in January, T-Mobile has cut even more of its workers, GeekWire reports. It's unclear how many people were laid off at this time, but it could be in the hundreds.

“To move even faster in a dynamic market while continuing to deliver best-in-class digital experiences for our customers, we’re further aligning our IT organization to support future growth and innovation… This includes the difficult decision of eliminating some roles while continuing to invest and hire in areas,” T-Mobile told GeekWire in a statement.

Meta

Meta began laying off hundreds of employees on March 25, totaling around 700 people, per The New York Times. Those impacted were part of the Reality Labs team, as well as social media and recruiting teams. Though still significant, this is a much smaller number compared to a Reuters report that suggested 20% off staff would be affected by layoffs due to the increased spending on AI.

This change comes as the company is shifting away from its metaverse creation, which includes Horizon Worlds for its Quest VR headset that's operated by the Reality Labs team.

Epic Games

The gaming giant on March 24 announced it was laying off more than 1,000 workers in an effort to right-size the staff of its popular free-to-play online shooter, Fortnite. CEO Tim Sweeney sent a note to his staff, citing the reason for the layoffs is due to the "downturn in Fortnite engagement," which means "we're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded." He made it a point to note the layoffs are not related to AI. 

Ubisoft

105 employees from the Red Storm Entertainment team were laid off by Ubisoft in an effort to cut costs, IGN reports. Game development has ended at the studio, so the downsizing will remain permanent. The company employed 180 people in 2022 but has seen multiple layoffs over the years.

Atlassian

Roughly 1,600 employees were laid off at Alassian on March 16, which is around 10% of total workers. Ahead of the layoffs, Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes shared a message with the entire team, letting them know the reason is to "self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales, while strengthening our financial profile. We’re also changing the way we work and reorganising around our System of Work to move faster." Impacted employees received an email shortly after this message went out.

Bill Gates may be the iconic face of Microsoft (MSFT), but he isn’t solely responsible for the company’s groundbreaking achievements — those were driven by a global team of highly skilled and dedicated workers.

The original Windows 1.0 team, for instance, was a small and scrappy group of 20-something developers who, in 1983, built the platform out of Microsoft’s Bellevue, Washington, office, often staying up all night and figuring things out as they went along.

These workers reunited in 2025 for a 40-year reunion, joined by Microsoft’s former CEO and Windows 1.0 project leader, Steve Ballmer, but the reunion itself was only made possible by a hidden Easter egg the team had embedded in the software — an internal credits list that took decades to uncover.

Engineers and developers have always been a core part of Microsoft’s business, but as the company has evolved, their roles have pivoted. Programmers started out coding in Visual Basic and C++ during the MS-DOS and Windows era, only to take on greater engineering functions as the company developed its Azure hybrid cloud technology.

Today, Microsoft’s employees focus on building, training, and overseeing AI models — rather than writing code themselves.

In fact, despite its massive workforce, Microsoft has invested heavily in AI infrastructure while trimming costs to offset its spending, leading to big layoffs in 2025.

So, just how many employees does Microsoft have now?

How many employees does Microsoft have in 2026?

According to the company’s 2025 Annual Report, Microsoft employs 228,000 full-time workers.

Here’s how the employees break down:

• 125,000 are US workers

• 103,000 are international workers

Their job functions range from operations (89,000), including product support, manufacturing, and distribution roles, to research and development positions (80,000), sales and marketing jobs (44,000), and administration (15,000), which includes HR, finance, and legal positions.

Related: History of Microsoft: Company timeline & facts

Where are Microsoft’s employees located?

Microsoft has offices in over 100 countries around the world, but the majority of its workers are located in the United States, China, India, and Europe.

The company’s headquarters is in Redmond, Washington (it moved from Bellevue in 1986), and its Redmond campus remains its beating heart, a hub for its engineers, product teams, and executives.

Microsoft also has a large footprint in India, with engineering teams in Hyderabad and a Bangalore base for cloud and AI development.

However, its sales, marketing, and customer service divisions are housed in the United States.

Related: Microsoft’s logo over the years: A timeline of innovation

Has Microsoft had layoffs recently?

Yes. While AI has not replaced Microsoft's human workforce, according to Yahoo! Finance, the sheer cost of building AI systems led Microsoft to make significant workforce cuts in 2025.

The publication reported that MSFT spent $88 billion on AI in fiscal year 2025, and it also slashed 15,000 jobs. In July alone, the company laid off 9,000 workers.

Dow company histories:

• History of Apple: Company timeline and facts

• History of Coca-Cola: Timeline, facts & milestones

• History of Nike: Company timeline and facts

Yahoo! Finance highlighted a memo by Xbox chief Phil Spencer, detailing how the “necessary” cuts would “increase agility and effectiveness.”

Despite reporting record performance in 2025, with revenues up 15% from 2024 to $281.7 billion and operating income of $128.5 billion, representing a 17% increase, Microsoft has been streamlining its workforce to offset its AI investments.

Speculation on further layoffs in 2026 persists on message boards like Reddit, but so far, nothing has materialized. A January 2026 article by The Seattle Times quotes Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s Chief Communications Officer, who responded to the rumors on X by saying that they were “100 percent made up / speculative / wrong.”

Related: What does IBM do? Inside its AI, cloud & consulting business

This story was originally published by TheStreet on Apr 22, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

Meta employees are fuming over a new internal tool that tracks their clicks and keystrokes — the latest flashpoint in the company’s all-in push on artificial intelligence.

Staffers reacted with alarm after learning the software would monitor mouse movements, typing and on-screen activity to help train Meta’s AI systems, according to internal communications viewed by Business Insider.

One employee wrote, “This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?” — a comment that quickly became the top response, as others flooded the thread with angry reactions, including a wave of “angry face” emojis.

Employees were reacting to a new internal program first reported by Reuters, which said Meta would train its AI systems by analyzing keystrokes and mouse movements on workers’ computers.

Executives told workers there would be no option to opt out on company-issued devices, while Meta said the program includes safeguards and is limited to work-related applications.

The backlash comes as Meta ramps up a sweeping — and costly — overhaul of its AI strategy, pouring billions into infrastructure, talent and new products in a bid to catch up with rivals like OpenAI and Google.

Meta is also reported to be on the verge of slashing its workforce, with the company planning to cut about 10% of its global staff — or roughly 8,000 workers — starting May 20 and potentially more later this year as it pivots toward AI-driven roles.

The layoffs are part of a broader effort to reshape the company around artificial intelligence, with executives pushing to automate tasks previously handled by human workers, according to Reuters.

“If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus,” a Meta spokesperson told The Post.

“To help, we’re launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models. There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose.”

The tracking tool — known internally as the Model Capability Initiative — captures employees’ mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes while they work, and can also take periodic snapshots of what’s on their screens, according to internal memos cited by Reuters.

The software runs only on work-related applications and websites, with the goal of collecting real-world data on how people actually use computers.

Meta says the data will be used to train AI systems to better mimic everyday human behavior — such as navigating menus, using keyboard shortcuts and completing routine digital tasks — areas where current models still struggle.

The company has said the information won’t be used for employee performance reviews and that safeguards are in place to protect sensitive content, though the initiative is part of a broader push to build AI agents capable of handling work tasks autonomously.

Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that Meta staffers will have the option of chatting with a virtual AI-powered clone of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.