The number arrived without ceremony. By March 25, the TrueUp layoff tracker recorded 59,821 tech workers cut from their jobs in 2026. The figure will almost certainly cross 60,000 before the week ends, because Meta announced a new round of layoffs on Tuesday — this time across Reality Labs, Facebook's core app, recruiting, and sales divisions. [1]

The scale of the cuts is striking. Block, the payments company formerly known as Square, eliminated 4,000 positions — roughly 40 percent of its workforce. The stock surged 24 percent the day the layoffs were announced. Atlassian cut 1,600 employees, about 10 percent, with CEO Scott Farquhar citing the need to "restructure for AI." Epic Games shed more than 1,000 workers, about 20 percent. Each announcement followed the same script: the company expressed regret, invoked artificial intelligence as the transformative force requiring the restructuring, and watched its share price rise. [2]

The World Economic Forum's latest survey found that 41 percent of companies worldwide expect to reduce their workforces due to AI by 2030. That number frames the current layoffs not as a correction but as the leading edge of something structural. WARN Act filings — the federal notices companies must submit before mass layoffs — now cover 413,000 workers affected in the first quarter.

What makes 2026 different from the layoff waves of 2022 and 2023 is the justification. Two years ago, companies said they had overhired during the pandemic. Now they say they are reshaping their workforces around AI capabilities. The distinction matters because overhiring implies a return to equilibrium — the jobs come back when hiring resumes. AI restructuring implies they do not.

The pattern is consistent enough to describe precisely. A company announces layoffs. It simultaneously announces increased AI capital expenditure. The market rewards both signals — fewer humans, more machines. Meta's reported plan to cut as many as 16,000 workers runs parallel to its pledge of $135 billion in AI infrastructure spending. The money that once paid salaries now buys GPUs.

For the workers themselves, the arithmetic is grimmer than the headlines suggest. Tech compensation packages include stock vesting schedules, healthcare benefits, and retirement contributions that vanish on the termination date. A software engineer earning $250,000 in total compensation does not simply find another $250,000 job when the industry is contracting and every major employer is running the same playbook.

The tracker updates daily. The number only goes up.

-- David Chen, Beijing