New Delhi, Aug 15 (IANS): Tech companies have laid off 226,000 employees so far this year, almost 40 per cent more than in 2022, a report showed on Tuesday.

Although the tech industry has seen a shocking number of job cuts last year, 2023 has been much worse.

The massive wave of layoffs has shut down hundreds of thousands of workplaces, turning 2023 into the worst year the tech industry has ever seen, according to data by AltIndex.com.

Between January and December 2022, tech companies laid off 164,744 employees, almost eleven times more than 15,000 reported a year before, as per data from Layoffs.fyi.

A shocking 75,912 people lost their jobs in January alone, almost half of all layoffs reported in 2022.

February saw a decline with roughly 40,000 job cuts. Although the number of layoffs continued falling in the next three months, tech companies still reported almost 73,000 job cuts in this period.

Since then, they have let go nearly 24,000 staff members, pushing the total number of layoffs to 226,117 as of last week, said the report.

Facing an uncertain global economy, inflation, ongoing supply chain issues, and slowing revenue growth, the tech companies picked up the pace of layoffs in 2023, led by giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.

“But hundreds of other smaller tech companies, from retail and crypto to the transportation market, have also been forced to make painful cost-cutting measures, resulting in the highest number of layoffs the tech industry has ever seen,” the report noted.

The layoff figures for the last three years are even worse. Statistics show that tech companies laid off more than 405,000 people since the beginning of 2021.

US tech giants had a massive role in the 2023 wave of layoffs. In fact, statistics show US companies made eight out of the ten largest job cuts reported this year, the report noted.