The fall season brings colourful leaves, pumpkin spice lattes — and, if you work in tech, the unfortunate, looming spectre of layoffs.
What happened: Amazon cut 180 positions from its gaming division after shutting down its Crown streaming channel and Game Growth marketing platform. The company plans to focus its efforts on Prime Gaming, which has plans to release new Blue Protocol, Tomb Raider and Lord of the Rings games.
- That came less than a week after an unspecified number of layoffs in the company’s music streaming division. Amazon has cut over 27,000 jobs over the last year.
Why it matters: The tech sector is not done downsizing. While the sweeping layoffs that began last fall were largely aimed at right-sizing organizations that had ballooned during the pandemic, smaller numbers of job cuts have continued as companies grapple with economic headwinds.
Zoom out: Snap and Google cut about two dozen jobs each within the last week. Snap previously lost 170 jobs when it shut down its Enterprise AR division in September, while Alphabet made layoffs at Google News, healthcare data unit Verily and self-driving car subsidiary Waymo in October.
- Since the summer, layoffs of varying sizes have hit the likes of Nextdoor, Splunk, LinkedIn, Qualtrics, Microsoft and Uber.
In Canada: WonderFi, which acquired fellow struggling crypto platforms Coinsquare and CoinSmart in the summer, disclosed this week that it has reduced its headcount by one-third over the last quarter. But that might have more to do with typical post-merger cost cutting, as well as the particularly cool crypto market.