• IBM employees are the latest to be hit by a wave of layoffs at major US tech and finance companies. 
• The companies are cutting thousands of employees in total. 
• See the full list of layoffs so far in 2023. 

A wave of layoffs that hit dozens of US companies toward the end of 2022 shows no sign of slowing down into 2023. 

IBM is the latest tech giant to slash thousands of workers. In an interview, the company’s CFO, James Kavanaugh, told Bloomberg that IBM would reduce its workforce by a “ballpark” figure of 3,900. 

Kavanaugh reportedly said the cuts would be focused on staff who remained at the company after IBM spun off two of its businesses: IT company Kyndryl and AI healthcare company Watson Health. 

However, IBM is not the first major corporation to make significant cuts in the new year: Fellow tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, and finance behemoths, like Goldman Sachs, announced massive layoffs in the first weeks of 2023 amid a continued economic downturn and stagnating sales.

The downsizing followed significant reductions at companies including Twitter and Meta late last year. 

The layoffs have primarily affected the tech sector, which is now hemorrhaging employees at a faster rate than at any point during the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported. According to data cited by the Journal from Layoffs.fyi, a site tracking layoffs since the start of the pandemic, tech companies slashed more than 150,000 in 2022 alone — compared to 80,000 in 2020 and 15,000 in 2021. 

Here are the notable examples so far in 2023: