Last year was a bloodbath for tech workers around the world. Across all of 2025, this strata of highly trained professionals lost some 122,606 jobs across 278 global tech companies, driven by extremely wealthy corporations like Amazon and Meta that were cleaning house as they made major AI investments.
Yet for as bad as last year was for labor, 2026 is sure to be far worse, as the number of tech-industry layoffs by mid-August has already surpassed 2025’s total.
That’s according to Fast Company, which recently observed that tech layoffs in 2026 had reached 125,759 by August 6. That number will continue to climb precipitously as companies like Etsy and Zillow shed workers like last week’s Primark fit.
Case in point, the total number of layoffs just a week after the FC report now stands at 126,305, per the layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi, fueled by downsizing at software giants like Salesforce and LinkedIn, as well as the cybersecurity company Rapid7.
The advent of commercially-available large language models has been a kind of kryptonite for the once dynamic tech labor sector. Now that their bosses have easy access to generative AI models that can spit out halfway passible code, developers and software engineers have been forced onto the back foot, with many choosing to leave the industry altogether.
Ironically, those AI tools are now helping execs decimate the very roles that made the AI boom possible in the first place — a kind of mass-deskilling that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.
More on tech labor: AI Is Pushing Older Employees Straight Out of the Workforce, New Report Finds
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