Microsoft said Monday 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 “will not be replaced by AI”, but acknowledged that “AI is changing how work is done” and automating many daily tasks.
The cuts continue what feels to many in the tech industry like an epidemic: companies reporting record revenues while shedding 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. About 120,000 tech roles have now been cut by 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 imploded during the pandemic’s hiring surge, raising questions about what’s really going on right now. Below is a running look—in reverse chronological order—at the major tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor.
Oracle — June 22, 2026. Oracle revealed in late June that it had reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a 13% decrease, meaning more cuts than previously known, partly due to artificial intelligence. “The adoption and implementation of AI technologies across our operations has resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions in our workforce,” the company said in an annual financial regulatory filing.
GitLab — June 3, 2026. GitLab laid off about 350 employees, about 14% of its staff, to fund investments in AI infrastructure and handle increasing traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said agency workloads were “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 – continuously until May. Alphabet’s Google has been quietly cutting staff across its Cloud division, including its Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant-affiliated 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, 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 cut about 3,000 jobs — about 17% of its total workforce — in a restructuring centered on reducing complexity and reallocating resources to AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly told staff that the company is reducing complexity and simplifying its structure so it can deliver better products.
Meta — 20.-21. May 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, about 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles (which they reportedly hate). CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff the cuts were necessary because “success is not a given” in AI.
Cisco — May 14, 2026. Cisco announced that it is cutting nearly 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profits and earnings. CFO Mark Patterson said: “This really wasn’t an austerity-driven restructuring … it’s more [about] realignment of resources around silicon, optics, security and artificial intelligence.”
Cloudflare — 7-8 May 2026. Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce (1,100 people) and reported quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, a 34% year-over-year increase and the highest single quarter in the company’s history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that “the vast majority of those we laid off last week were gauges” — middle management, finance, legal, internal audit and revenue recognition.
General Motors — May 12, 2026. GM eliminated 500 to 600 jobs, mostly in IT roles, in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it was reassessing 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 about 80 open IT positions, including roles in artificial intelligence, motorsports and autonomous vehicles.
Coin base — May 5, 2026. The crypto exchange said it is cutting about 700 employees, or 14% of its workforce, 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” that combine engineering, design and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI had dramatically changed the pace of work — “engineers are using 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 job.”
PayPal — May 5, 2026. PayPal announced plans to cut about 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 created a new “AI transformation and simplification” team reporting directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s processes “feature by feature.” Lores framed the cuts as removing organizational layers and said AI would extend well beyond coding to 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 affect. CFO Amy Hood said total headcount fell year-over-year in the third quarter, and is expected to continue falling as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that work with speed and agility” amid increasing AI investments.
Snap — April 16, 2026. Snap cut about 16% of its global workforce — about 1,000 full-time employees — and closed more than 300 open roles, with CEO Evan Spiegel citing AI advances as a key driver. “Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are enabling our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase speed 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 teams use 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 technical reductions, estimates range from 3,000 to 9,000 US positions eliminated, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 over 15,000. Bloomberg reported that IBM plans to triple its entry-level hiring in the US for AI and hybrid cloud roles, even as about 200 HR positions were replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesman 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 business sales, though shares rose nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “Our approach is not ‘AI is replacing humans’. But it would be disingenuous to pretend that AI isn’t changing the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain fields. It is.”
Dell — 30 January (but published in March 2026). Dell’s total workforce fell about 10% in fiscal 2026 — about 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 expected its AI-optimized server revenue to double in fiscal 2027.
Oracle — 5.-31. March 2026. As mentioned above, Oracle began telling employees that it would cut 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 to AI data centers. The cuts, which would later total 21,000 over 12 months, Oracle revealed in its annual filing on June 22.
Block — 26-27 February 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 4,000 jobs – nearly half of its workforce, down to under 6,000 from over 10,000. Dorsey wrote at 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 that’s fundamentally changing what it means to build and run a business.” He added: “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I think the majority of companies will come to 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: “Due to the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decrease and we no longer need to actively fill support engineering roles.” This followed an earlier cut of around 4,000 customer support roles, reducing the team from around 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed “smaller heads” because AI agents are handling the work.
Amazon — January 28, 2026. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs after 14,000 layoffs in October 2025 — about 9% of the company’s workforce in three months. The company said it was part of “strength[ing] our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing red tape.” CEO Andy Jassy 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 to do some of the tasks that are done today… in the next few years, we expect this to reduce our overall enterprise workforce as we achieve efficiency gains by using AI widely across the enterprise.”
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