Layoffs.fyi data: 60 tech companies cut 16,000+ jobs in May 2022; Microsoft, Nvidia, Lyft, Snap, Uber, Coinbase, Salesforce, Meta, and Twitter slowed hiring
What goes up must come down. — High-flying startups with record valuations, huge hiring goals and ambitious expansion plans …
Context & Ripple Effects
May 2022 marks the moment the post-pandemic hiring boom visibly broke: after just ~15,000 tech job cuts across all of 2021, Layoffs.fyi logged 16,000+ cuts from 60 companies in a single month, with Microsoft, Nvidia, Lyft, Snap, Uber, Coinbase, Salesforce, Meta, and Twitter all slowing hiring rather than expanding.
The month reads differently in hindsight — it was the opening move of a multi-year contraction that ran through over 17,000 US tech layoffs by mid-2022, a far larger January 2024 wave, and into 2026's record months, making this dataset the baseline against which every later Layoffs.fyi tally gets compared.
First-order effects
- More than 16,000 workers across 60 companies lost jobs in May alone, while nine of the sector's largest employers — Microsoft, Nvidia, Lyft, Snap, Uber, Coinbase, Salesforce, Meta, Twitter — froze or throttled hiring, closing off the usual absorption channel for those cuts.
Second-order effects
- Once mega-cap names like Microsoft and Meta slow hiring alongside startups cutting staff, headcount discipline stops being a startup-specific response and becomes an industry-wide norm, pressuring every competitor's growth targets and compensation offers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — 2022's 150,000+ cuts escalating into 2024 and 2026 waves with cuts increasingly concentrated at giants like Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft — tech employment becomes structurally cyclical rather than perpetually expansionary, and third-party trackers like Layoffs.fyi harden into the sector's de facto labor-market scoreboard.
The trend: Tech employment has shifted from a decade of uninterrupted expansion to recurring layoff cycles, with Layoffs.fyi's monthly tallies becoming the standard measure of each new wave.