Yahoo today announced it is laying off 1,600 employees, or up to 20% of its workforce, to join a long list of Silicon Valley companies that have taken the same step since the beginning of this year, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Amazon and others.
Today, Thursday, 1,000 employees were notified of layoffs, and the remaining employees will be laid off gradually over the coming months.
Yahoo CEO (Jim Lanzon) said in a statement to Axios that this wave of layoffs is not the result of economic hardship, but rather a shift in the company’s strategy to correct the company’s loss-making advertising sector, while clarifying that his company does not plan to completely retire from advertising market.
And Yahoo added that it plans to improve some parts of its services for advertisers, especially its platform, which helps to automatically buy ads to show them to a wide range of publishers. The company also confirmed that overall it is still profitable despite losses in its advertising sector as it generated $8 billion in revenue last year.
In this regard, GitHub, owned by Microsoft, announced the layoff of 10% of its 3,000 employees, as well as the fact that it will close all its offices and switch to a full remote work system.
GitHub is the largest source code hosting service for developers and companies, with hundreds of thousands of companies around the world relying on it to store their programs, and it has over 100 million users. In 2018, Microsoft acquired the company for $7.5 billion, but GitHub still operates as an independent company.
The new layoffs come as part of a wave of mass layoffs carried out by major technology companies in the recent period, and this comes, according to analysts, due to the high inflation observed in global markets and fears that the market is heading for a possible recession that came after the period coronavirus pandemic, during which technology companies have significantly increased employment rates.
Major global companies have laid off 5 to 7 percent of their employees since Amazon announced earlier this year that it was laying off 18,000 employees, followed by Microsoft with 10,000 layoffs, Alphabet with 12,000 layoffs, Twitter with 7,500 employees. employees and PayPal with 2000 employees.
