Oracle on Monday said it has cut its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a 13% decline. This means more job cuts than previously known, including jobs lost to AI. “The adoption and deployment of AI technology across our businesses has resulted in, and may continue to result in, workforce reductions,” the company said in its annual financial regulatory filing.
The revelations add new numbers to what feels like an epidemic to many in the tech industry. Companies are reporting record profits while simultaneously cutting staff, pointing to AI as both a driver of growth and a reason for layoffs. According to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, May saw the highest number of tech layoffs in a single month in recent years, with AI being the most cited reason.
We recently wrote about why that rationale needs to be reconsidered by businesses. Especially because for many of these companies, the people they’re currently cutting were hired during the pandemic hiring surge, raising questions about what’s really going on. Here’s a reverse chronological overview of the major technology companies that announced significant layoffs this year, with AI clearly a factor.
GitLab — June 3, 2026. In one of the latest layoffs on this list, GitLab laid off about 350 employees, about 14% of its staff, in order to fund investments in AI infrastructure and handle surging traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said agent workloads are “pushing our competitors to the brink” and the company has begun a “generational restructuring” of its core infrastructure to support what he calls 100x growth requirements. GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening its management layer, and partnering with unspecified AI labs to rebuild its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company reported first-quarter sales of $264 million, up 23% year over year, and expects to incur $30 million to $35 million in restructuring costs.
Google — Ongoing through May. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has quietly cut jobs across its cloud division, including its threat intelligence group and Mandiant-related cybersecurity staff, even as cloud revenue rose 63% to surpass $20 billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to more than $460 billion. Over the past year, Google has cut more than a third of its managers overseeing small teams. There are 35% fewer managers and fewer direct reports. Unlike most companies on this list, Google has never released its overall numbers. The job cuts are being carried out through a rolling performance review process, voluntary acquisition program and structural restructuring, with external estimates pegging the total number of engineers in 2026 from 1,500 to more than 3,000.
Intuit — May 20, 2026. Intuit announced plans to eliminate approximately 3,000 jobs, or approximately 17% of its total workforce, in an organizational restructuring centered on reducing complexity and reallocating resources to AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi told staff that the company is reducing complexity and simplifying its structure so it can deliver better products.
Meta — May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 employees to new AI-focused roles (which they reportedly disliked). Zuckerberg told staff that the cuts were necessary because “success is not a given” in AI.
Cisco — May 14, 2026 Cisco announced nearly 4,000 job cuts, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profits and revenue. CFO Mark Patterson said, “This wasn’t really a savings-driven restructuring…This is more of a realignment of resources around silicon, optics, security and AI.”
Cloudflare — May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce (1,100 people) and reported quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year over year and the company’s best single quarter in history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote, “The majority of those we laid off last week were in middle management, finance, legal, internal audit, revenue recognition and other measurement roles.”
General Motors — May 12, 2026 GM has cut 500 to 600 jobs, primarily in IT-related positions, in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it is reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the layoffs told CNBC that while AI played a role in the decision, it was not the only reason. “We are transforming our information technology organization to better position the company for the future,” GM said in a statement. Despite the job cuts, the company still had about 80 open IT positions in areas such as AI, motorsports and self-driving cars.
Coinbase — May 5, 2026. The cryptocurrency exchange announced that it will cut approximately 700 jobs, or 14% of its workforce, as part of an organizational restructuring aimed at responding to market volatility and improving AI efficiency. The company said it will flatten its organizational structure to five levels below the CEO and COO and experiment with “one-person teams” that combine engineering, design and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong said AI has dramatically changed the pace of work. “With AI, engineers can now ship work in days that previously took teams weeks,” he said, adding that the company needs to “leverage AI in every aspect of our work.”
PayPal — May 5, 2026. PayPal has announced plans to cut approximately 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years as part of a turnaround strategy centered around AI adoption and organizational simplification. That’s over 4,500 people. CEO Enrique Lores told investors that the company is “aggressively introducing AI” into its development processes and has created a new “AI Transformation and Simplification” team that will report directly to him and will be tasked with redesigning the company’s processes “on a functional basis.” Lores characterized the layoffs as the removal of organizational layers and said AI will extend far beyond coding into customer service, support operations and risk management.
Microsoft — April-May 2026. Microsoft proposed the acquisition, which was structured as a voluntary redundancy, but did not say how many employees would be affected. CFO Amy Hood said total headcount was down year-over-year in the fiscal third quarter and is expected to continue to decline as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility” as AI investments increase.
Snap — April 16, 2026. Snap has cut approximately 16% of its global workforce (approximately 1,000 full-time employees) and eliminated more than 300 open positions. CEO Evan Spiegel says advances in AI are a key driver. “Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have enabled our team to reduce repetitive tasks, increase speed, and better support our communities, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote in a memo filed with the SEC. The company said it has already seen its small team use AI tools to drive advances across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency.
IBM — Continues until 2026. Between 3,000 and 9,000 positions are estimated to be eliminated in the U.S. between Q4 2025 cuts and Red Hat Engineering cuts in April 2026, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 to more than 15,000. Bloomberg reported that IBM plans to triple its entry-level AI and hybrid cloud hiring in the US, even though around 200 HR jobs have been replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesperson described the Q4 2025 round as a regular rebalancing that will impact “low single digits” of its global workforce.
Atlassian — March 11, 2026. Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs (10% of its workforce) as it seeks to “rebalance” to AI and enterprise revenue, even as its stock rose nearly 2% on the news. “Our approach is not ‘AI will replace humans,'” said CEO Mike Cannon-Brooks. But it would be disingenuous to claim that AI will not change the mix of skills needed or the number of roles needed in a given field. There it is. ”
Dell — January 30 (but disclosure March 2026). In fiscal 2026, Dell’s total workforce was approximately 97,000, down approximately 11,000 from 108,000 in the prior year, and the company spent $569 million in severance. The reduction comes after Dell predicted that AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.
Oracle — March 5-31, 2026. As mentioned above, Oracle began telling employees via terminal email that they were cutting thousands of jobs. The cuts came even as Oracle posted a 27% year-over-year increase in quarterly net income to $3.7 billion, and its remaining performance obligations rose 325% to $553 billion, with the savings directed toward AI data centers. The reductions will total 21,000 jobs over 12 months, Oracle revealed in its June 22 annual report.
Block — February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s block eliminated 4,000 jobs. It reduced almost half its workforce from more than 10,000 to less than 6,000. Dorsey writes in X: “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, combined with smaller, flatter teams, are enabling new ways of working that fundamentally change what it means to start and run a company.” He added, “I think most companies are behind the curve. Within the next year, the vast majority of companies will come to the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”
Salesforce—February 10, 2026. Salesforce has laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across its marketing, product management, data analytics, and Agentforce AI divisions. “Thanks to the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we are handling fewer support cases and no longer need to actively fill support engineer roles,” the company told Fortune. This follows the company’s previous decision to cut about 4,000 customer support roles and shrink its team from about 9,000 to 5,000 people, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed to “reduce headcount” as AI agents handled the work.
Amazon — January 28, 2026. Amazon has cut about 9% of its corporate workforce by 16,000 jobs over three months, following 14,000 job cuts in October 2025. The company said this was part of “strengthening the organization by reducing hierarchy, increasing ownership and eliminating bureaucracy.” CEO Andy Jassy said in June 2025, “As we deploy more generative AI and agents, the way we work will change. We will need fewer people to do some of the jobs we do today…We expect to reduce our overall workforce over the next few years as we drive efficiencies through widespread use of AI across the company.”
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