Analysis of layoff announcements, WARN filings, and independent reports compiled by research firm TradingPlatforms.co.uk places Oracle at the top of this year's list with 25,754 redundancies following an expanded restructuring programme that included a recent round affecting roughly 600 employees in Romania. Amazon comes second at 16,600, most of them corporate roles eliminated in January as the second phase of a downsizing that began with 14,000 cuts in October 2025. Cognizant follows at 15,000 under its ‘Project Leap’ restructuring, tied to a cost programme of $230–320 million that the company expects to reduce its workforce — predominantly in India — as it shifts to an AI-augmented delivery model. Meta rounds out the top four at 10,400 across multiple rounds in 2026, with its largest single cut — roughly 8,000 people, or 10 percent of its workforce — arriving in May.
Microsoft, the most recent to act, has cut approximately 5,500 roles, around 2.5 percent of its 220,000-person global workforce, in reductions spanning sales, consulting, and Xbox. The company has not confirmed an exact figure. The cuts extend a pattern from 2025, when Microsoft eliminated approximately 15,000 roles across two rounds.
Not all of the cuts are driven by the same logic. Amazon explicitly framed its January reductions as removing management layers rather than an AI-related headcount adjustment, even as it continued heavy investment in AI infrastructure. That distinction matters, as Stanislava Savisheva, an analyst at TradingPlatforms, observed: “When you look at this year’s job cuts, it’s easy to say AI is killing jobs. But look closer and you find two different things at play. A big part of it is genuine repricing — a company weighs what a task costs with AI versus without, and cuts the gap. But we are also seeing routine restructuring or a fiscal-year trim, dressed up in AI language because that’s the story investors want to hear.”
The sector remains on pace to exceed the 246,000 layoffs recorded across the whole of 2025 if the current rate holds through the second half of the year.
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