In email to staff, Dara Khosrowshahi says Uber will cut 3,000 more jobs, in addition to the 3,700 that were let go earlier this month, and will close 45 offices
Preetika Rana / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
This second round lands exactly where the reporting pointed: after the May 6 announcement that Uber would lay off 3,700 employees, about 14% of its workforce, executives were reportedly weighing a cut of roughly 20% of its 27,000 headcount — a plan that coincided with longtime CTO Thuan Pham's resignation. Today's email confirms the deeper cut was real.
The office closures extend a pattern rather than start one. Uber has been shrinking its footprint since at least mid-2019, when it cut ~400 marketing staff across 75 offices, followed by product and engineering layoffs that fall. The company has also retreated from capital-heavy bets before, shutting its US auto-leasing unit in 2017 to pursue 'a less capital-intensive approach' — the same logic now applied to real estate.
First-order effects
- Roughly 3,000 additional employees lose their jobs on top of the 3,700 cut earlier this month, taking total May layoffs to about 6,700 — near the ~20% reduction executives had discussed internally.
- Forty-five offices close, consolidating Uber's physical operations into fewer locations while pandemic-depressed ridership persists.
Second-order effects
- With both ride-hailing and delivery demand still impaired, rivals like Lyft face pressure to match the cost structure rather than compete for market share during recovery — Uber is effectively setting the sector's expense floor.
- Commercial landlords and secondary-office markets lose a marquee tenant class just as other tech employers weigh their own footprints, accelerating renegotiation leverage away from landlords.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern from 2017's auto-leasing exit through today's closures holds, Uber is structurally rebalancing toward asset-light operations — smaller headcount, fewer offices, less fixed cost — which becomes the template investors expect of gig platforms entering downturns.
- A permanently leaner Uber shifts the industry's center of gravity toward profitability discipline over growth-at-all-costs, raising the bar for any competitor still spending to expand.
The trend: Uber is executing a sustained, multi-year contraction — repeated layoff rounds and office closures since 2019 — that converts pandemic pressure into a permanent shift from growth spending to capital-light operations.