Tech layoffs are officially getting hard to count

You’d be forgiven for losing track of tech layoffs. But no matter who’s doing the counting, the numbers just keep rising.

In recent days (yes, days, not weeks), we’ve gotten news of layoff plans from LinkedIn and Cisco amounting to thousands of job cuts, while automaker GM cut hundreds of IT roles.

It’s all adding up to a particularly grim tech landscape: There have been over 135,700 people either laid off or part of announced cuts at tech companies thus far in 2026, according to data from TrueUp, a job search platform that tracks layoffs. By comparison, TrueUp said, in the whole of 2025, there were approximately 246,000 tech layoffs.

Already, the month of May has ushered in nearly 16,000 tech layoffs, compared with about 18,600 in April. April’s figures included announced layoffs at tech giants Meta and Snap, while marking an improvement from March’s grisly stats (almost 50,000 layoffs, largely due to an immense layoff push from Oracle that affected 30,000 jobs).

We’ve seen similar figures sliced and diced in different ways lately. In the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on May 5, the professional and business services sector, which includes many tech roles, reported the steepest drop in job openings in March: a decline of 318,000. Employers in the sector also laid off the most workers (527,000).

“The skills that are being demanded in tech jobs and specifically AI-enabled work [are] really changing what is being asked of workers,” Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist with ZipRecruiter, told HR Brew. “We’re seeing this turnover and this churn pointing to employers figuring out who is right for the role.”

“The job market remains in a sluggish hiring backdrop,” ZipRecruiter President and interim CFO David Travers said on the company’s May 8 earnings call.

Meanwhile, a May 7 report from global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found 33,361 announced job cuts in the technology sector in April for a total of 85,411 year to date. That marked “the highest year-to-date total for the sector since 2023,” the report’s authors said.

“Technology companies continue to announce large-scale cuts and are leading all industries in layoff announcements,” Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement tied to the report. “They are also often citing AI spend and innovation. Regardless of whether individual jobs are being replaced by AI, the money for those roles is.”