Yahoo to fire 1,000 employees this week

Yahoo, one of the pioneers of the early Internet age, is the latest technology company to lay off employees en masse to cut costs amid an uncertain global economy. According to Bloomberg, the company will lay off nearly 1,000 jobs, representing 12 per cent of its workforce. The company will reportedly send out emails this week. A company spokesperson also shared that the Apollo Global Management-owned company would reduce Yahoo for Business's ad-tech unit by nearly 50 per cent or more than 20 per cent of the workforce at Yahoo by the end of 2023.

In an interview with Axios, Jim Lanzone, Yahoo CEO, said that cutting staff would be "tremendously beneficial to Yahoo's overall profitability." Yahoo says the company is "very profitable" and that the job cuts were due to the restructuring of the division rather than problems in the ad market.

As part of the restructuring plan, Yahoo will shut down its Gemini advertising platform. On the other hand, Yahoo will outsource the work to Taboola, an advertising platform partnered with Yahoo. The company will reportedly shut down its advertising business, called SSP, or supply-side platform.

However, Yahoo is one of many tech companies taking strict steps to optimize energy and reduce expenses. A data tracker shared that January 2023 was the worst month for the tech industry regarding layoffs. According to Trueup.io data, approximately 106,950 workers at various tech companies lost their jobs last month, making it worse than the combined job losses in November and December last year (50,573 workers and 40,368 employees, respectively).

The layoff tracker notes that in the last few months, tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce laid off the most workers globally. February is a bit better than January, but many companies are laying off many workers. On the same day, Yahoo decided to cut its workforce; a report claims that Bytedance-owned TikTok is laying off all of its Indian staff three years after it got banned from India. Companies like Dell will also lay off 5 per cent of their global workforce, which is about 6,650 employees.

Most companies had attributed the layoffs to current macroeconomic conditions, plus overhiring in the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic when work-from-home accelerated. Reports citing analysts suggest more tech companies will lay off employees if things don't improve.