Among the main causes are the cuts in advertising, the increase in interest rates, the bad balances and the fall of its shares, within the framework of a recessive scenario.

Layoffs in the US tech industry marked the highest level since the coronavirus pandemic last October and the trend is expected to continue hand in hand with a slowing economy, rising interest rates and balance sheets that unnerve investors.

In October alone, the sector lost 9,587 jobs, the highest monthly number since November 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, said the consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in an index that collects the various announcements made by firms in the electronics areas, hardware, software and telecommunications.

The platforms are especially affected by the successive increases in interest rates ordered by the Federal Reserve (Fed), which motivates investors to sell their shares of riskier and more volatile assets -such as technological papers- to take refuge in government bonds. Treasure that now offers a better return and is safer.

Similarly, the economic slowdown and inflation are motivating advertisers and consumer firms to cut their advertising budgets, the main source of funding for many of these companies.

Just last week, the digital payment giant Stripe laid off 14% of its plant of just over 1,000 workers, while the mobility platform Lyft, the second in the United States after Uber, did so by 13%, a percentage that represents almost 700 employees.

But not only reasons related to the US economy play a role: some of the companies, such as Stripe, admitted that they hired more people than necessary during the pandemic thinking that the rate of growth and user habits would be sustained for years to come.

In the same vein, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who left the firm last year, lamented having expanded the size of the company “too quickly.” Dorsey’s statement came after the social network announced last Friday that it was laying off almost half of its 7,500 employees after it was acquired by Tesla tycoon and CEO Elon Musk.

Added to these announcements, there is a freeze on new hires at Amazon, Apple and Alphabet (Google’s parent company).

In the same way, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, plans to lay off “many thousands” of employees in an announcement that would become official tomorrow, Wednesday, according to people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal and reported by Bloomberg Agency. The Mark Zuckerberg – led firm , which has 87,000 employees worldwide, posted a 52% year-on-year drop in its third-quarter net profit, dragging its shares down. Meta investors are wary of the company’s recent focus on the so-called ” metaverse .”

Both in the case of Meta, which lost 71% of its value this year and in that of Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft, the latest balance sheets did not meet market expectations, triggering a collapse in their prices that even touched drops of 24%, after their quarterly balances were known.

In the case of Microsoft, this month the company announced the layoff of almost 1,000 people out of its 220,000 workers, which represents 1% of the total workforce.

Outside of large companies, the situation is no more favorable: nearly 104,000 startup workers have lost their jobs so far this year, up from 81,000 in 2020, according to the Layoffs monitoring platform.

Said figure, however, is less than when the dot-com bubble burst in 2001 and 2002, when the industry lost 168,395 and 131,294 jobs, respectively, in most cases due to company closures and bankruptcies.

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