2026-09-18
Tech Layoffs and Hiring News: What's Happening This Week
2026 has been a heavy year for tech layoffs - one tracker puts the total so far at over 200,000 workers affected, with AI investment cited as the single biggest driver. If you're job hunting right now, here's what's actually happening this week, and where the same companies (and others) are still hiring.
The biggest cuts this year
Oracle has had the largest single layoff of 2026, cutting around 30,000 roles - the biggest impact of any company tracked this year. Amazon's reductions have been one of the largest corporate tech cuts centered in San Francisco, affecting over 8% of its office workforce. PayPal is cutting 251 roles at its San Jose HQ immediately, with a further 20% reduction planned over the next few years as it redirects budget toward AI.
Several other well-known names announced cuts this week too: Salesforce (1,000+ roles, even as it hires for new AI product sales teams), Snap (1,000 jobs, about 16% of full-time staff), Nike (1,400 roles, mostly in technology), Groupon (roughly 25% of its workforce), and xAI (a smaller reorganization affecting engineering leadership, per founder Elon Musk).
Why this is happening
The pattern across almost every announcement is the same: AI investment. Companies are citing a shift of budget and headcount away from existing roles and toward AI development, research, and product integration - not simply correcting for pandemic-era over-hiring the way 2023's layoff wave mostly was. That distinction matters if you're job hunting: the roles being cut and the roles being opened often sit in different parts of the same company.
The other half of the story: hiring hasn't stopped
Layoffs and hiring are happening at the same companies, simultaneously. Salesforce is cutting over 1,000 roles while actively hiring staff to sell its new AI products. Meta says it's supporting employees affected by its own reductions while continuing to hire for new AI research teams - CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been personally recruiting researchers from rival labs. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said publicly that AI will both eliminate some roles and create others, not just shrink headcount overall.
That's a genuinely different shape of job market than a flat hiring freeze - it means the roles worth targeting right now often sit specifically in AI-adjacent teams, even at companies making headlines for cuts elsewhere.
What this means for your search
A layoff headline at a company doesn't mean every team there has stopped hiring - it usually means specific functions shrank while others, often AI-related, grew. Rather than ruling a company out entirely because of a headline, check what roles they actually have open right now before assuming there's nothing there. The same goes in reverse: a company that looks stable can still have quiet, unannounced reductions in specific teams, so don't treat the absence of headlines as a guarantee either.
Browse every open role synced directly from company career pages to see what's actually live today, or upload your resume to see which of them match your skills.
