By the second week of September 2026, tech companies had laid off roughly 128,500 employees across nearly 300 companies. That’s already more than the whole of 2025, according to the tracking site Layoffs.fyi – and there are still almost four months left on the calendar.
If you run HR, comms, or employer branding at a tech company, you already knew this. Your Slack has probably had more than one “did you see the news about Oracle” or “did you see the news about Amazon” moment this quarter. What’s worth sitting with is why the shape of these layoffs looks different from 2022’s bloodbath, and what that means for the people who didn’t get the email.
The numbers, plainly
2025 ended with 122,606 tech employees laid off across 278 companies. By September 10, 2026, that number was already beaten – 128,536 people, at 299 companies. Oracle’s single cut of 30,000 roles was the year’s largest event on its own. Amazon, Dell and Meta each shed tens of thousands more. Smaller names – Workday, GitLab, Robinhood – trimmed hundreds apiece.
Here’s the detail that actually matters more than the headline total: fewer companies are doing the cutting, and each one is cutting deeper. In 2023, 1,194 companies laid off an average of 220 people each. This year, 299 companies have averaged 430 people each. That’s not a broad correction. It’s concentrated pain at a smaller number of large employers – which changes how you should think about employer brand risk, because the exposure isn’t spread thin anymore. It’s sitting heavily on a handful of household names.
Block cut more than 40% of its staff in February. Intuit cut 17% in May. Those aren’t “trim the fat” numbers. Those are org-chart-redrawing numbers.
AI is the reason companies give. It’s not the only one.
Employers cited artificial intelligence in over 116,000 US tech job cuts through August, per Challenger, Gray & Christmas – making it the single most-named reason this year, ahead of restructuring, overhiring correction, or market conditions. Oracle is pouring $90 billion into AI infrastructure next fiscal year while cutting headcount. Meta and Amazon both raised their 2026 capex forecasts into the hundreds of billions at the same time they announced reductions.
Read that twice. Companies are spending record amounts on AI infrastructure and cutting people simultaneously. That’s not one story – it’s two stories running in parallel, and conflating them is how you end up with a stump speech instead of an honest internal message. Some of this is genuinely AI displacing tasks. A lot of it is also post-pandemic overhiring finally getting corrected, with AI providing convenient cover for a decision that was coming anyway. Vernon Keenan, founder of Keenan Vision, has described it less as one trend winning out and more as companies reshaping their structure – hiring where they need growth, cutting where they don’t, and using “AI efficiency” as the label for both.
Google, for its part, told The Seattle Times its own recent cuts were a team-level reorganization, not a company-wide layoff round. To the employees who lost their jobs, that distinction is academic. To the ones who didn’t, it’s the exact kind of framing that either builds trust or quietly erodes it.
What this does to the people who stay
This is the part that gets skipped in most of the coverage, and it’s the part your organization actually has some control over.
Careerminds’ 2025 research on layoff communications found that 58% of laid-off employees said they were less likely to recommend their former employer afterward. More than half of HR leaders surveyed reported measurable morale loss, brand damage, or trust erosion following layoffs that were handled poorly – and the uncomfortable finding buried in that same research is a perception gap: HR leaders consistently rated their own communication as more empathetic and better-prepared than the departing employees experienced it as.
Survivors carry weight too. The people still at their desks the Monday after a layoff round are watching everything – who got a heads-up, who found out from a Slack channel going quiet, whether leadership showed up in person or hid behind a memo.
That’s the moment your employer brand gets tested harder than any careers-page copy ever will. It’s also, not coincidentally, the exact gap that shows up when we look at organizations that have earned workplace certification versus those that haven’t – the difference between what leadership believes it’s communicating and what employees are actually experiencing on the ground.
What HR and people leaders can actually do right now
A few things, in rough order of what tends to matter most when a round has already happened or is clearly coming:
- Say the real reason, not the tidy one: If it’s overhiring correction, say that. Employees can tell the difference between “AI is transforming our workforce” and the truth, and the gap between the two is exactly what erodes trust fastest.
- Brief managers before the announcement, not after: The Google example above worked as well as it did partly because there was a consistent internal line before the external one landed.
- Don’t go quiet with the people who stay: Silence gets filled with worse rumors than whatever you’d have said. A short, honest all-hands beats a comms vacuum every time.
- Track the exit sentiment, not just the exit paperwork: Departing employees talk – on Glassdoor, on LinkedIn, in group chats with people still on your team. If you’re not measuring what they’re saying, you’re flying blind on your own reputation.
For more on how organizations are navigating culture and employer brand through periods like this, our Amazing Workplaces blog covers the ongoing HR and workplace-culture conversation in more depth.
The bottom line
Tech layoffs in 2026 crossing 2025’s full-year total isn’t really a story about a bad year getting worse. It’s a story about fewer companies making bigger, more consequential cuts, wrapped in AI language that’s only sometimes accurate. The number that should worry HR leaders more than the headline total is that 58% figure – because employer brand isn’t damaged by the layoff itself. It’s damaged by how it’s handled, and that part is still entirely within your control.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. While efforts are made to ensure accuracy, readers should verify information and seek professional advice as needed.
