From Microsoft to Match, tech layoffs surge in May 2025: How much is AI to blame?
Less than six months into 2025, the tech industry is grappling with repeated rounds of job cuts. Over 50,000 techies have been laid off this year so far, according to Layoffs.fyi. A staggering 24,545 tech employees were victims of reductions across 26 companies in April alone, as per the independent layoffs tracker.
In comparison, 2024 saw around 1,50,000 job cuts across 549 companies. In May 2025, big tech companies Amazon, Google, and Meta announced reductions in certain divisions while Microsoft announced its biggest round of job cuts since 2023, with over 6,000 employees being laid off across its businesses.
AI has emerged as the common thread behind these layoffs, with two key driving factors: Companies are increasingly turning to AI and automation to boost efficiency, with some of them even pursuing an all-in, AI-first strategy. Meanwhile, the surging cost of building AI infrastructure is making other companies cut back on headcount in order to prioritise resources.
This comes amid growing evidence that the knowledge and skills of human workers may not be as easy to replace with AI as initially anticipated. For instance, Swedish fintech firm Klarna has said that it is once again recruiting humans for customer service after its AI-first strategy of deploying customer-service agents led to lower quality results, according to a report by Bloomberg.
'It's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human if you want,' Sebastian Siemiatkowski, founder and CEO of Klarna, was quoted as saying. In a recent IBM survey of 2,000 CEOs globally, the respondents said that only 25 per cent of AI initiatives have delivered expected returns over the last few years and just 16 per cent of AI projects have been scaled across the enterprise.
With that said, here are the tech companies that have announced job cuts in May 2025 so far.
Microsoft announced on Tuesday, May 13, that it is laying off around three per cent of its workforce which translates to at least 6,000 employees. The job cuts are reportedly set to affect all levels of the tech giant's business empire, including certain international offices of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. The company's AI director Gabriela de Queiroz, was also among those who were asked to leave.
'We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,' a Microsoft spokesperson was quoted as saying by The Verge.
Amazon on Wednesday, May 14, cut about 100 jobs in its devices and services unit, the group overseeing development of such diverse products as the Kindle, Echo speakers, Alexa voice assistant and Zoox self-driving cars.
'As part of our ongoing work to make our teams and programs operate more efficiently, and to better align with our product roadmap, we've made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles,' a company spokesperson was quoted as saying by Reuters.
Google on Tuesday, May 6, cut about 200 jobs across its global business unit, which is responsible for sales and partnerships, according to a report by The Information.
The company said that it was making a small number of changes across teams 'to drive greater collaboration and expand our ability to quickly and effectively serve our customers,' as per Reuters.
On Monday, May 13, Chegg said it would lay off about 22 per cent of its workforce. This amounts to 248 employees that will be asked to leave the company as it looks to cut costs and streamline its operations. Chegg's decision comes as students increasingly turn to AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT over traditional edtech platforms.
As part of the restructuring announced on Monday, Chegg also said it will shut its US and Canada offices by the end of the year, according to a report by Reuters.
The cybersecurity company announced on Wednesday, May 7, that it is planning to cut about 500 roles or roughly fiv per cent of its workforce as part of its efforts to streamline operations and reduce costs. As of January this year, the Texas-based company reportedly had around 10,118 full-time employees.
'While we will continue to prudently hire, primarily in customer-facing and product engineering roles, we are reducing roles in some areas of the business,' Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz was quoted as saying by Reuters.
Match Group announced that it is laying off 13 per cent or 325 staffers in a bid to reduce costs, shore up margins, and streamline its organisational structure, according to a report by TechCrunch.
The dating app giant had a total of 2,500 employees as of December 2024, according to its annual report. The Tinder and Hinge parent company is also not hiring for open roles anymore. The layoffs are aimed at helping Match operate as one company, not brands that are managed independently, Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Match, was quoted as saying.
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