The Biggest Layoffs of 2022 So Far

Despite warnings from some financial advisers that we are headed into a recession, unemployment — one of the key indicators of a recession — remains low.

The most recently available data from September 2022 indicates the current unemployment rate is 3.5 percent, close to the lowest it has been in 20 years.

However, several big layoffs have made the news this year, with tech, real estate, and crypto being the hardest-hit markets so far, while layoffs at Shopify and Peloton show that stay-at-home stocks are also on the decline.

Here are some of the biggest layoffs we've seen so far in 2022, and what, if anything, the cuts may indicate.

The massive crypto sell-off came to roost at Coinbase, where around 18 percent of the full-time workforce learned on Tuesday, June 14, that they were out of a job. The crypto exchange, which went public in April 2021 and closed its first trading day at $328.28, has seen its stock value fall more than 80 percent as crypto prices have also taken a dramatic tumble.CEO Brian Armstrong cited the potential for a recession leading to a long and severe "crypto winter," and also conceded that the company grew "too fast" during the bull market of 2021.

The mortgage industry is perhaps the heaviest hit with layoffs in 2022. Real estate companies Redfin and Compass both announced layoffs in June 2022. The firms reduced their workforces by 8 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

The announcements are hardly a surprise with mortgage rates having nearly doubled since January, leading to a significant slowdown in demand.

In April, Better.com took a lot of flak for laying off 900 workers over Zoom and insulting many of those being let go. Wells Fargo also let go an undisclosed number of employees within its mortgage lending sector in April 2022.

Compass went on to have another round of layoffs in September 2022, which cost them $23 million and $26 million in severance and termination benefits.

Carvana's layoff made the news not only for the number of workers left in the dust — around 18 percent of the workforce, or 2,500 people —but the way they were given the news. Many of the affected employees reported to various news outlets that they were told they were losing their jobs in mass Zoom calls. Some, due to technical issues, weren't able to connect to calls and were left to figure out via Slack whether they still had a job. It was a master class on how not to conduct a layoff.

To add insult to injury, the same day Carvana told employees they were out of a job, the company announced it was spending $2.2 billion to purchase several used-car auction sites from Kar Auction Services.

In April 2022, Robinhood announced it was making a 9 percent reduction in its workforce, which TechCrunch estimates impacted around 300 workers. The layoff followed a "hypergrowth" period during the earlier lockdown period of the pandemic where the retail investing platform saw huge gains in activity leading to its July 2021 IPO.

Another round of layoffs took place in August 2022, slashing another 23 percent of its workforce. "As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory — this is on me," CEO Vlad Tenev wrote in a blog post at the time.

Citing a "super bad feeling" about the economy, Elon Musk announced to Tesla employees on June 2 that he was enacting a hiring freeze and that probably 10 percent of salaried employees would be cut. However, he indicated the layoffs wouldn't impact hourly production employees and in fact, he had plans to increase the production workforce. A few days prior to that announcement, Musk told salaried employees that they must return to the office or resign, a move many cited as a "pre-layoff layoff" designed to reduce the number of severance packages in any forthcoming layoff.

While Netflix and Peloton thrived during the lockdown in 2020, their stocks have taken a hit during the great reopening. Peloton reported a near $440 million loss in earnings for the quarter ending December 31, 2022, which led to layoffs for 20 percent of corporate staff, or around 2,800 employees.

Netflix had a more modest workforce reduction, mainly focused on its infant companion website, Tudum, which mainly affected contract employees. Tudum was launched in December 2021, and many have criticized the company for not properly marketing the website.

Another brand that misjudged how much stay-at-home stocks would drop is Shopify, whose earnings reflect that people are shopping online quite a bit less than anticipated. After the announcement, the company's stock price fell 14 percent. Before the layoff, Shopify employed an estimated 10,000 people at the time of their 2021 Q4 SEC filing, which would mean around 1,000 Shopify workers are re-entering the job market.

According to the layoff announcement, affected employees will receive 1 weeks' severance pay, plus an additional week for every year they were employed by Shopify.

Following a round of cuts in July 2022, Microsoft announced it was laying off an additional 1,000 employees in three months later — mostly in its gaming division.

“Like all companies, we evaluate our business priorities on a regular basis,” a Microsoft spokesperson explained. “We will continue to invest in our business and hire in key growth areas in the year ahead.”

In August 2022, Snap Inc. announced plans to lay off roughly 20 percent of its more than 6,400 employees. This doesn't come as a huge surprise since the company's stock price has declined 80 percent this year.

Another social media platform expecting major cuts is Twitter. According to The Washington Post, Elon Musk plans to cut 75 percent of Twitter’s staff as part of his takeover deal.

It was reported in October 2022 that Meta will "quietly" lay off 12,000 underperforming employees (or 15 percent) across company teams — and will also freeze hiring across the board. In November 2022, Meta followed through on that announcement and laid off more than 11,000 employees to cut spending.

Zuckerberg wrote a message to Meta employees: "I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I'm especially sorry to those impacted."

In his letter to employees, Zuckerberg explained that he read the market wrong and predicted an incorrect future for Meta's growth following the COVID-19 pandemic. Zucker believed that since Meta grew during the pandemic, the same would continue, which did not happen.

"Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I'd expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that."

Amazon plans to lay off 10,000 employees in November 2022, which is about 3 percent of Amazon's corporate employees and under one percent of the company's global workforce. According to The New York Times, staff at risk of being dismissed have corporate and technical roles.

This layoff would be the biggest in Amazon's history and greatly impact those in the retail and human resource division. Amazon currently employs more than 1 million full and part-time workers around the world.

CNN, the multinational cable news channel, has let go about 440 employees. Their parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, did this in an effort to cut costs. In response to the layoff, Chris Licht, CNN CEO, sent a note out to remaining staffers saying,

"To my CNN colleagues, as promised in my note yesterday, I am following up with an overview of the changes we have made across the company. Our goal throughout the strategic review process has been to better align our people, processes, and resources with our future priorities, strengthen our ability to deliver on CNN's core journalistic mission, and enable us to innovate in the years ahead. At the highest level, the goal is to direct our resources to best serve and grow audiences for our core news programming and products."

Cisco has announced that 4,100 of its employees will be laid off, which is about five percent of the company's workforce. Amid this dismissal, the company also plans to reorganize its structure altogether. Cisco is hiring for new positions and according to Forbes, their goal is to build their staff back to its original amount. They're also working to keep some of their employees by moving them from closing departments to new ones. Cisco intends to send off their employees that were let go with "generous severance packages" as well.