t’s been another bad week for tech industry jobs. In recent days, several major tech companies have announced layoffs—a trend that has been ongoing since the beginning of the year. According to tech layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi, 144 tech companies have already laid off employees in 2024, amounting to 34,560 jobs lost. These are the latest major tech companies to announce job cuts this week:
MOZILLA
On Tuesday, the maker of the Firefox web browser announced it would cut about 5% of its workforce, amounting to 60 jobs lost. As Bloomberg reported, most of those job cuts will impact people in product development roles.
The layoffs came about a week after Mozilla appointed board member Laura Chambers as its new CEO. Announcing the layoffs, Mozilla said in a statement, “We’re scaling back investment in some product areas in order to focus on areas that we feel have the greatest chance of success. We intend to re-prioritize resources against products like Firefox Mobile, where there’s a significant opportunity to grow and establish a better model for the industry.”
INSTACART
Also on Tuesday, Instacart announced it would be cutting jobs to concentrate on “promising” initiatives. In a Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the grocery delivery company said that on February 9, its board approved restructuring actions “to improve operational efficiencies and better align the Company’s organizational structure with current business needs, top strategic priorities, and key growth opportunities.”
As part of that restructuring plan, Instacart will cut about 250 positions, which equals about 7% of its total global workforce as of January 31, 2024. CNBC reported that the layoffs are meant to create a flatter organizational structure at the company and allow teams to focus more on advertising efforts and other larger products.
CISCO
Finally, the largest tech layoffs yet this week were announced on Wednesday. Networking giant Cisco announced it is eliminating 4,250 jobs—or about 5% of its global workforce. However, the job cuts did not come out of the blue. Over the weekend, Reuters reported that the cuts were coming, according to sources familiar with the matter, who said the company wants to focus on high-growth areas. Cisco’s data shows that it had a total of 84,900 employees at the end of its fiscal 2023.