The tech layoffs aren’t over, as eBay lets go of 500 employees
It follows Meta, Twitter, Microsoft and Google
eBay is the latest tech firm to layoff a chunk of its staff, as it announced 500 employees would be let go.
As CNBC reports, the layoffs amount to about 4% of its total workforce and have been triggered, according to CEO Jamie Iannone, in response to the economic downturn faced across the globe over the last several months.
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: eBay job cuts
🙁 eBay has laid off 500 employees
🖥 It’s the latest tech firm to announce big job cuts
🪓 Twitter, Meta, Microsoft and Google have all axed positions in the last few months
🚫 But eBay can’t pivot to AI to help save it
Iannone hopes the cuts will bolster eBay’s longevity and let it focus on areas where it can expand. What exactly those areas are, he didn’t say.
“Importantly, this shift gives us additional space to invest and create new roles in high-potential areas – new technologies, customer innovations and key markets – and to continue to adapt and flex with the changing macro, ecommerce and technology landscape,” Iannone said.
The layoffs are just the latest round of job losses to hit the tech sector. Twitter started things off last year when it cut its workforce in half after Elon Musk took over the platform.
Since then, Meta announced 11,000 redundancies and Google axed 12,00 jobs.
Microsoft also revealed 10,000 employees were let go earlier this year, again, in the face of global economic trouble. That had a domino effect within the company, as it also shut down its metaverse experiment and made big changes to its gaming wing, with 343 Industries all but starting again from scratch.
When announcing their layoffs, both Google and Microsoft took the opportunity to reiterate their future investments in AI technology, likely hoping to shore up confidence among investors that they were at the forefront of the latest tech trend.
Both companies have already made good on that promise and have seemingly entered into a kind of AI arms race. After announcing a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, Microsoft has already rolled out a new, AI-powered version of Bing that uses the technology behind ChatGPT.
Google, for its part, has announced it’s working on an AI language model to rival ChatGPT, and released a few other artificial intelligence engines like the text-to-music generator MusicLM.
eBay, unfortunately being an online marketplace platform, doesn’t have the same opportunity to pivot to the latest tech trend. Although don’t be surprised if we find AI popping up on the service in the future. It seems everyone wants in on it at the moment.