Tech companies have cut more jobs than last year. Nobody can agree by how many.

By Strota Newsroom · 2026-09-29 · How Strota reports

Ask how many tech jobs have been cut this year and you get a number. Ask a second source and you get a different one. Both are built by people who do this for a living, and the gap between them is large enough that quoting either figure alone is a choice, not a fact.

Crunchbase News, on 25 September, put US tech layoffs from January through August at 94,046. That is 16.8 per cent above the 80,486 it counted in the same months of 2025. Business Standard, two weeks earlier, cited a different tracker, Layoffs.fyi, and a different geography: 128,536 technology employees across 299 companies, globally, by 10 September. That second figure had already passed the 122,606 the same tracker recorded for the whole of 2025.

Neither number is wrong on its own terms. They are counting different things. Crunchbase tracks US tech employers, or companies with a strong US presence, and it says so in its methodology note. Layoffs.fyi tracks tech layoffs globally and files each one under the country where the company is headquartered, not the country where the person worked. A cut at a US company that lands on a team in Bengaluru counts as American on that list.

The single biggest disagreement is one company. Layoffs.fyi leads its year with Oracle, at 21,000 jobs, about 13 per cent of the workforce, announced in June. Crunchbase looked at the same company and left it out. Its reason is specific: Oracle's workforce fell by about 21,000 in the fiscal year ended 31 May 2026, but the count and the timing of each cut were unclear, so the tracker declined to include a total it could not date. Drop one company and the league table changes shape.

Where the two lists do overlap, the names repeat, and they are not startups. Crunchbase has Amazon at 17,388 cuts through August, most of it a 16,000-person reduction announced in January. Meta is next at 10,400, including 8,000 in May, which was 10 per cent of that company's workforce. Microsoft cut 4,800. PayPal cut 4,760. Block, Cisco and Cognizant each cut 4,000. Intuit cut 3,000, Amdocs 2,900, Visa 2,600. Roger Lee, who runs Layoffs.fyi, told Crunchbase that big companies account for about 87 per cent of everyone laid off this year, against 85 per cent last year.

A separate tally of the Layoffs.fyi database, published by Second Talent on 10 September, puts the same point in a different cut. Companies already listed on a stock exchange account for 108,459 of the 128,536, which is 84 per cent. The jobs are not disappearing from firms that ran out of venture money. They are being cut by firms that report quarterly earnings and are choosing where to spend.

The reason those firms give has shifted faster than the headcount has. Lee said artificial intelligence was cited in 33 per cent of tech layoff events this year, up from 1 per cent in 2024. His tracker attributes 92,913 layoffs, or 72 per cent of the year's total, to AI. He then said the part that undercuts the citation: there has been little evidence that AI is actually doing the work of the people let go. The stated reason and the demonstrated replacement are not the same thing, and the person who built the tracker is the one drawing that line.

The shape of the year is a burst, not a slope. Crunchbase has December 2025 at 5,151 cuts, January above 20,000, and May at 31,513, the heaviest month since March 2023, when the count was 36,602. Then it falls. August was 2,347. June through August together were 19,331, which is 16.2 per cent below the same three months a year earlier. A year that is ahead of last year overall can still be slowing in its most recent quarter. Both statements fit the same table.

India is in this data, and it is easy to misread. Second Talent's tally puts India second by headquarters country, at 4,725 jobs across 25 layoffs, behind the United States at 103,957, or 81 per cent. That ranking counts where the company is based. It does not count where the employee sat. PayPal's India cut is one of the few that is stated directly: 220 jobs, about 4 per cent of its India workforce, inside a wider restructuring. A global total filed by headquarters will understate the Indian share of a US company's cut, and overstate it for an Indian company cutting abroad.

There is a smaller fact that complicates the idea of a one-way exit. Crunchbase reported that Amazon has started contacting eligible former employees about open roles, including in its cloud and AI businesses, citing a Business Insider account. A company that cut 16,000 people in January is, by September, hiring some of them back into the part of the business the cuts were supposed to fund. That is not a reversal of the January number. It is evidence that the January number was a reallocation, not a shrinkage of the work.

The methodology notes are the part a reader should actually keep. Crunchbase says its figures are best estimates, that the true count is likely higher, and that the reason is simple: many companies announce a restructuring and do not say how many people it covers. A tracker can only add the cuts that come with a number. Every unnumbered announcement is a hole, and the holes all point the same way, toward a larger total than the one printed.

So the honest comparison is not a single percentage. On a US-only tracker, tech cuts through August are 16.8 per cent above the same months last year. On a global tracker, the year had already passed all of 2025 by 10 September, 128,536 against 122,606. Move Oracle from one column to the other and both rankings change. None of those statements requires picking a favourite source.

The close is the limit of the data, not a prediction about the next quarter. The cuts are concentrated in large, listed companies. The reason most often given is a technology that the tracker’s own founder says has not been shown to replace the work. The most recent three months are below last year even though the year as a whole is above it. And the number of jobs cut in India, as opposed to the number cut by companies that happen to be based somewhere else, is not a figure any of these trackers actually publishes.

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