In 2026, a wave of layoffs in the tech industry has been linked to artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, with major companies citing it as a reason for workforce reductions despite reporting record revenues. Key layoffs include Microsoft cutting 4,800 roles (2.1% of its workforce), Oracle reducing 21,000 roles (13%) due to AI advancements, and GitLab laying off 350 employees to focus on AI infrastructure. Other notable layoffs include Intuit (3,000 jobs), Meta (8,000 jobs), and Cisco (4,000 jobs). The trend raises questions about workforce dynamics, with companies reorganizing to streamline operations and adjust to the changing landscape brought on by AI.

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Every major tech layoff in 2026 that has name-checked AI

Rebecca Bellan

Connie Loizos

11:35 AM PDT · July 6, 2026

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Microsoft said Monday that it has eliminated about 4,800 roles, or 2.1% of its global workforce, adding to the string of AI-related layoffs hitting the tech world. The company said the roles being cut are “not being replaced by AI,” but acknowledged that “ AI is changing how work gets done” and automating many everyday tasks.

The cuts continue what feels to many in the tech industry like an epidemic: companies reporting record revenues while simultaneously culling their workforces, pointing to AI as both the engine of growth and the reason for the cuts. Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in years in May, and AI was the most-cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Roughly 120,000 tech roles have now been cut in 2026, according to Layoffs.fyi, a tracker that has monitored industry layoffs since 2020.

We recently wrote about why that rationale is something companies may want to rethink, not least because for many of these companies, the teams they’re now cutting ballooned during the pandemic hiring surge, raising questions about what’s really going on right now. Below is a running look — in reverse chronological order — at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor.

Oracle — June 22, 2026. Oracle disclosed in late June that it had reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%, which means more cuts than was previously known, including because of AI. “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” the company said in an annual financial regulatory filing.

GitLab — June 3, 2026. GitLab laid off roughly 350 workers, about 14% of its staff, to fund AI infrastructure investment and handle surging traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said agentic workloads are “pushing competitors to the brink” and that the company had begun a “generational rebuild” of its core infrastructure to support what he called 100x growth requirements. GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening management layers, and partnering with an unspecified AI lab to rebuild its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $264 million, up 23% year-over-year, and expects to incur $30 to $35 million in restructuring costs.

Google — ongoing through May. Alphabet’s Google has quietly cut employees across its Cloud division, including its Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant-linked cybersecurity staff, even as Cloud revenue grew 63% to exceed $20 billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to over $460 billion. Over the past year, Google has cut more than a third of the managers overseeing small teams — 35% fewer managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike most companies on this list, Google has never announced a single overall number — the cuts have come through a rolling performance review process, a voluntary buyout program, and structural reorganizations, with outside estimates putting the 2026 total at between 1,500 and 3,000+ engineers.

Intuit — May 20, 2026. Intuit announced plans to eliminate roughly 3,000 jobs — about 17% of its total workforce — in a restructuring centered on reducing complexity and reallocating resources toward AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly told staff the company is reducing complexity and simplifying the structure so it can deliver better products.

Meta— May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles (that they reportedly hate). CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff the cuts were necessary because “success isn’t a given” in AI.

Cisco — May 14, 2026. Cisco announced it’s cutting nearly 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profit and revenue. CFO Mark Patterson said: “This was really not a savings-driven restructure… this is more [about] realigning … resources around silicon, optics, security and AI.”

Cloudflare — May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce (1,100 people), reporting quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year-over-year and the highest single quarter in company history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that “the vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers” — middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition.

General Motors— May 12, 2026. GM eliminated 500 to 600 jobs, largely in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it was reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the cuts told CNBC that AI played a role in the decision but that it wasn’t the only reason. GM’s statement said it was “transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.” Despite the cuts, the company still had roughly 80 open IT positions, including roles in AI, motorsports, and autonomous vehicles.

Coinbase — May 5, 2026. The crypto exchange said it was cutting about 700 employees, or 14% of its staff, as part of a restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing AI efficiency. The company flattened its organizational structure to five layers below the CEO and COO, and said it would experiment with “one-person teams” combining engineering, design, and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI had changed the pace of work dramatically — “engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks” — and that the company needed to “leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.”

PayPal — May 5, 2026. PayPal announced plans to cut around 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years — north of 4,500 jobs — as part of a turnaround strategy centered on AI adoption and organizational simplification. CEO Enrique Lores told investors the company would “aggressively adopt AI” in its development processes and formed a new “AI transformation and simplification” team reporting directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s processes “function by function.” Lores framed the cuts as removing organizational layers, and said AI would extend well beyond coding into customer service, support operations, and risk management.

Microsoft— April-May 2026. Microsoft offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees these would impact. CFO Amy Hood said total headcount declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3, and is expected to keep declining as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility” amid rising AI investment.

Snap— April 16, 2026. Snap cut roughly 16% of its global workforce — about 1,000 full-time employees — and closed more than 300 open roles, with CEO Evan Spiegel citing AI advancements as a key driver. “Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote in a memo filed with the SEC. The company said it had already seen small squads using AI tools to drive progress across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency.

IBM — rolling through 2026. Between Q4 2025 cuts and April 2026 Red Hat engineering reductions, estimates range from 3,000 to 9,000 U.S. positions eliminated, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 above 15,000. Bloomberg reported IBM plans to triple its U.S. entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles, even as roughly 200 HR positions were replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesperson described the Q4 2025 round as a routine rebalancing affecting “a low single-digit percentage” of its global workforce.

Atlassian — March 11, 2026. Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs (10% of its workforce) to “rebalance” toward AI and enterprise sales, even as shares rose nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people.’ But it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.”

Dell— January 30 (though disclosed in March 2026). Dell’s total workforce fell about 10% in fiscal 2026 — roughly 11,000 jobs — to about 97,000 employees from 108,000 a year earlier, with $569 million spent on severance. The cuts came as Dell projected its AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.

Oracle — March 5-31, 2026. As noted above, Oracle began telling employees it would be cutting thousands of jobs via terminal emails. The cuts came even as Oracle posted $3.7 billion in quarterly net income, up 27% year-over-year, with remaining performance obligations up 325% to $553 billion — savings redirected toward AI data centers. The cuts that would later total 21,000 over 12 months, as Oracle disclosed in its June 22 annual filing.

Block — February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce, down to under 6,000 from over 10,000. Dorsey wrote on X: “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” He added: “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”

Salesforce — February 10, 2026. Salesforce laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit. The company told Fortune, “Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles.” This followed an earlier cut of about 4,000 customer-support roles, shrinking that team from roughly 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed “less heads” because AI agents handle the work.

Amazon — January 28, 2026. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs, following 14,000 cuts in October 2025 — about 9% of its corporate workforce in three months. The company said it was part of “strengthen[ing] our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” CEO Andy Jassy had said in June 2025 that, “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today… in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

Topics

AI, AI, Layoffs, TC

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Rebecca Bellan

Senior Reporter

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Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications.

You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.

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Connie Loizos

Editor in Chief & General Manager

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Loizos has been reporting on Silicon Valley since the late ’90s, when she joined the original Red Herring magazine. Previously the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch, she was named Editor in Chief and General Manager of TechCrunch in September 2023. She’s also the founder of StrictlyVC, a daily e-newsletter and lecture series acquired by Yahoo in August 2023 and now operated as a sub brand of TechCrunch.

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Microsoft lays off nearly 5,000 employees across Xbox, commercial sales

Rebecca Bellan

8:32 AM PDT · July 6, 2026

Microsoft cut around 4,800 roles, or 2.1% of its global workforce, on Monday — the latest in a series of layoffs that’s stoking fears that AI will replace people at companies.

The layoffs will hit Xbox and commercial sales the hardest, with Xbox losing 1,600 staffers today, according to memos shared with Microsoft’s staff.

Here’s a snippet from a memo from Amy Coleman, EVP and chief people officer:

Our business is changing because the world around it is changing. The way technology is built, deployed, and used is transforming faster than at any point in my time here. Our customers’ needs are shifting, the business models that serve them are shifting, and that means the work itself — what we do, where we focus, and how we’re organized — has to transform too.

Companies don’t get to choose whether their industry changes; they only get to choose whether they change with it. That means we will need to adjust resources and roles and shift how we operate so we can have the greatest impact for our customers.

Coleman stressed that the roles being eliminated today “are not being replaced by AI,” but noted, “what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done.”

“Some of the tasks we do every day can now be automated, and that means we all need to keep learning, keep building new skills, and keep adapting as the work evolves,” Coleman wrote.

To many feeling the sting of unemployment, that’s a distinction without a difference.

The layoffs build on Microsoft’s recent launch of its Frontier Company business unit, which is focused on delivering enterprise AI deployments with the firm’s existing AI tools and an army of forward deployed engineers. That move is backed by a $2.5 billion investment, mirroring a common theme we’re seeing among layoffs this year — job cuts are correlating with increased AI spending.

Speaking about the Xbox layoffs, Coleman said little: “We are restructuring to position the business for long-term success. Engineering teams across the company will also evolve their structure and priorities to meet customer needs and innovate for the future.”

Of today’s 4,800 layoffs at Microsoft, 1,600 will hit Xbox, with about 3,200 cuts in total expected through fiscal year 2027, according to Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox. In an email she sent to employees on Monday, Sharma called this “the most significant restructure in Xbox history.”

“Our business today is not healthy,” Sharma wrote. “We are operating at margins that are 3–10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses.” She added that Xbox made bets like its monthly subscription service Game Pass, alongside moves to grow its portfolio of content and invest in multiplatform, among other attempts to breathe life into the business. None of those strategies grew at the expected pace, leading to the core business weakening even as Xbox added more teams and investment.

“And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history,” Sharma said. “We must reset Xbox.”

As part of the shift, Microsoft will transition four of its gaming studios to operate under new management, ensuring preservation of intellectual property and ongoing projects. Specifically Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to independent studios, according to Sharma. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are coming under new ownership with funding to complete and grow some of their more popular games.

According to Sharma’s memo, Xbox is also flattening management hard, cutting the current 14 management layers to no more than five, but ideally three. As part of this major organization redesign, Xbox is making longtime executive Helen Chiang chief operating officer with end-to-end profit and loss authority across content, hardware, platform, and services.

Xbox’s restructuring plan centers around narrowing focus by dropping sprawling creative bets that don’t produce platform-scale returns, and instead homing in on core strategic pillars like Mojang and King, the studios behind Minecraft and Candy Crush.

The Xbox layoffs come as the gaming industry shrinks amid new generative AI opportunities. Companies building world models — like Google DeepMind, World Labs, General Intuition, Luma AI, and Runway — have received millions in funding over the past year and garnered plenty of hype for their playable world model demos. All of those companies see gaming as a near-term opportunity for commercialization.

In April, Microsoft offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations to an undisclosed number of employees — some estimates put the number at around 5,500 — with the goal of building high-performing teams. Last year, Microsoft laid off about 15,000 employees across two rounds.

The eliminations are part of a series of layoffs in the tech industry that’s seen close to 154,000 people lose their jobs just in the first half of 2026, with Big Tech firms like Meta, Oracle, Amazon, and Cognizant cutting thousands of workers.

Microsoft said that along with Monday’s cuts, it’s working on ways to keep staff on by reskilling workers or placing people in new roles.

“Over the past year, we have redeployed more than 4,000 employees into new roles, including another 500 this month,” Coleman said.

Microsoft did not immediately return a request for comment and more information.

This article has been updated with more details into the Xbox layoffs. It was originally published July 6, 2026, at 8:08 a.m. PT.

Topics

AI, Enterprise, Microsoft, tech layoffs, xbox

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Rebecca Bellan

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You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.

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Bending Spoons signage during the company's initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Wednesday, July 1, 2026. Bending Spoons applies a private equity playbook to software, buying up mostly fledgling subscription-based apps, slashing headcount and handing operations to its roster of Italian engineers. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images Image Credits: Bloomberg / Getty Images

Venture

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What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that’s now public

Anna Heim

6:33 AM PDT · July 5, 2026

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based tech conglomerate that made headlines for acquiring the likes of AOL and Vimeo, went public on the Nasdaq this week with a pop, briefly reaching a market capitalization over $25 billion.

While Bending Spoons stock has slightly slumped since then, its market cap remains double its previous private valuation of $11 billion, confirming investor appetite for its playbook and portfolio, which includes digital brands such as Meetup, Eventbrite, and WeTransfer.

Bending Spoons’ strategy shares similarities with private equity, with the difference that it holds onto the brands it acquires. Its focus is on making them more financially successful — with tech and AI, but also often through price hikes and layoffs that have caused controversy.

Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products such as Evernote were genuinely loved by their users. But he said that despite all the changes, customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”

The user base of Bending Spoons itself has grown significantly in its 13 years of existence, and particularly in the last couple of years. As of March 2026, its portfolio served over 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million monthly paying customers, according to its filing.

This also goes against the idea that Bending Spoons acquires dead companies, a narrative that entrepreneur Joe Hyrkin has been battling since selling digital publishing platform Issuu to the Italians in 2024.

“’Old internet brands’ is the wrong frame,” Hyrkin wrote on LinkedIn after the IPO. “They acquire products with real customer behavior, then integrate them into a centralized system of product, engineering, data, monetization, AI, and operating discipline.” This seems to be working: Bending Spoons reported $1.31 billion revenue in 2025; but its market capitalization indicates that investors anticipate even more.

How did Bending Spoons start?

The little-known backstory is that Bending Spoons was born out of the remains of Evertale, a Copenhagen-based startup that participated in Disrupt SF 2011’s Startup Alley and raised seed funding for its photo-sharing app, Wink.

Evertale failed not long after, and investors were able to exit, but its founders and a couple of employees kept working together, initially on in-house apps. Soon enough, the team made its first acquisition, followed by many others, CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari told the venture podcast 20VC in one of his rare interviews before the company decided to go public.

In 2020, Bending Spoons made an exception to its policy of no longer building its own products when it created and donated Immuni, Italy’s official COVID-19 contact-tracing app. But other than that, it has mostly been honing a formula: identifying a popular product it thinks it can improve inside and out, and buying it from owners who have reached their limits in some way.

This approach was long orthogonal to VC, and Bending Spoons remained bootstrapped for years. But it eventually raised equity financing several times, including in 2022, 2024 and 2025. Pre-IPO, it also had VIP backers like tech industry bigs Eric Schmidt, Mike Krieger, and Xavier Niel; and stars Andre Agassi, Bradley Cooper, Maluma, The Weeknd, and The Chainsmokers.

What happens after a Bending Spoons acquisition?

After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.

While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.” It is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.

What companies has Bending Spoons acquired?

While Bending Spoons acquired several companies between 2014 and 2021, including the AI-powered photo enhancer Remini, its most notable acquisitions happened more recently.

In 2022, it acquired Filmic, known for its popular video- and photo-editing apps, and laid off the entire staff in December 2023.

In a deal also announced in 2022 and finalized in early 2023, Bending Spoons also acquired Evernote, the note-taking app that had reportedly reached a $1 billion valuation before hitting trouble. Layoffs followed the acquisition, as well as cuts to Evernote’s free offering.

The first half of the following year, 2024, was particularly active, with the acquisition of Meetup, app maker Mosaic Group, and Hopin’s StreamYard all happening within six months.

In July 2024, it went on to acquire the publishing platform Issuu and the file transfer service WeTransfer, where it later cut staff and made changes to its free plan, introducing stricter limits. In December 2025, WeTransfer’s cofounder Nalden criticized Bending Spoons’ decisions and said he was building another file transfer service.

In November 2024, Bending Spoons announced it would spend $233 million on an all-cash take-private deal to acquire video platform Brightcove. The acquisitions continued apace in early 2025, with route planner Komoot and management software maker Harvest.

Bending Spoons also announced its intention to acquire Vimeo in a $1.38 billion all-cash deal, and soon after, to acquire AOL from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. (Disclosure: Both AOL and Yahoo are former owners of TechCrunch, and Yahoo retains a small interest.)

In December 2025, Bending Spoons announced it would acquire yet another well-known brand: Eventbrite — and for only some $500 million, a far cry from the company’s $1.76 billion valuation when it went public in 2018.

The Vimeo deal closed in the latter half of 2025, and was followed by massive layoffs impacting most of the workforce including the entire video team. The acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite and Tractive were also completed this year.

What’s next for Bending Spoons?

Four of Bending Spoons’ cofounders have remained at its helm over the years: Matteo Danieli, Luca Ferrari, Francesco Patarnello, and Luca Querella. The IPO made them billionaires, at least on paper, while retaining control of the company, with more than 80% of the voting power.

Some of their decisions will affect workers. According to the company, it added “1,830 full-time equivalent team members through the acquisitions of AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo” but has already “parted ways” with many, and will continue. “Once the transformations of the three businesses are substantially complete later in 2026, we expect only a few hundred to remain.”

This headcount reduction presumably won’t affect the number of “Spooners” — the term Bending Spoons reserves to some core team members that have gone through its highly selective hiring process. There are currently some 620 of them, but that number hasn’t grown fast: in 2025, it only made 286 hires out of some 800,000 job applications.

Core headcount may not have increased by much, but productivity has. “In part helped by progress in AI, revenue per full-time equivalent Spooner increased from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025, and was $0.97 million in Q1 2026,” the company said. It helped it escape the SaaS reckoning it now also hopes to benefit from.

“As many businesses struggle to adapt, our ability to expand the earnings of an acquired business may improve,” Bending Spoons observed. In addition, “an environment of greater uncertainty could provide opportunities for us to acquire businesses at more favorable valuations.”

Despite what it sees as a favorable moment, Bending Spoons has remained selective in its acquisitions, but keeps on a wide net. By its own reporting, it sourced over 2,500 acquisition opportunities in 2025, conducted in-depth analyses of approximately 200 of them, and completed six acquisitions. More will certainly follow — that’s the playbook.

“We’ve identified more than 1,000 digital businesses (both private and public) that could be attractive acquisition targets in the future, representing nearly $400 billion in aggregate estimated revenue in 2025,” Ferrari wrote in a letter on behalf of the Bending Spoons team.

The playbook hasn’t changed, but the hint at take-privates is a reminder that the company has gone from paying “$10,000 for our first acquisition” to now “pursuing acquisitions in the billions of dollars.”

What follows may be even more intense. “As AI enables us to accomplish more with fewer people, the scalability of our acquisition and transformation model should improve as well,” Ferrari predicted.

This story was originally published in October 2025 and is updated periodically with new information.

Topics

AOL, Bending Spoons, Europe, evergreens, Italy, Mergers and Acquisitions, Venture

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Anna Heim

Freelance Reporter

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Anna Heim is a writer and editorial consultant.

You can contact or verify outreach from Anna by emailing annatechcrunch [at] gmail.com.

As a freelance reporter at TechCrunch since 2021, she has covered a large range of startup-related topics including AI, fintech & insurtech, SaaS & pricing, and global venture capital trends.

As of May 2025, her reporting for TechCrunch focuses on Europe’s most interesting startup stories.

Anna has moderated panels and conducted onstage interviews at industry events of all sizes, including major tech conferences such as TechCrunch Disrupt, 4YFN, South Summit, TNW Conference, VivaTech, and many more.

A former LATAM & Media Editor at The Next Web, startup founder and Sciences Po Paris alum, she’s fluent in multiple languages, including French, English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

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