PayPal is laying off around 2,000 employees, the company announced Tuesday.
The cuts account for around 7% of the company’s workforce and will take place over the next few weeks, CEO Dan Schulman said in a statement.
Schulman emphasized that the company was operating in a “challenging macroeconomic environment,” and said that while the company had made progress getting its cost structure under control, it had “more work to do.”
The CEO wrote that laid-off workers would be given severance and support after they departed the company.
“We will treat our departing colleagues with the utmost respect and empathy, provide them with generous packages, engage in consultation where required, and support them with their transitions,” he wrote. “I want to express my personal appreciation for the meaningful contributions they have made to PayPal.”
PayPal is just the latest tech company to announce major layoffs, following a slew of others including Meta, Alphabet, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, Spotify, Stripe, Amazon, and Salesforce. Many companies went on hiring sprees during the height of the COVID pandemic. But when advertising revenue fell this year, spurred by fears of a global slowdown caused by inflation and subsequent interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, these tech companies found themselves in a very different business landscape.
Workers have often been left reeling from the impersonal nature of the cuts, waking up to zero email access, or denied entry into their office building. For employees who are working in the U.S. on a visa, the layoffs have meant a desperate scramble to find a new job within a short period of time before they are forced to leave the country.
In one instance, a Google employee on maternity leave found out she had been cut while she was feeding her daughter. Tech employees have left messages on LinkedIn and other social media platforms venting their frustrations about being axed.
“I’m devastated. I’m sad, angry,” one former Google employee wrote.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
