Tech Layoffs Keep Rising

The 2026 tech layoff wave is already bigger than many full years in other industries: 78,557 workers were cut from January 1 to early April, and more than 76% of those cuts were in the United States. Nearly 37,638 of the eliminated roles were linked to artificial intelligence and workflow automation, at least in company explanations collected in recent reporting. (finance.yahoo.com) That total is rising fast enough that Layoffs.fyi, the live tracker many recruiters and founders watch, showed 71,447 tech employees laid off across 80 companies when checked on April 10, 2026. A tracker like that works like a storm map: it does not tell you why every tree fell, but it shows the damage is widespread, not isolated. (layoffs.fyi) Some of the biggest cuts are coming from companies that are not shrinking out of existence. Computerworld reported that Atlassian cut about 1,600 roles on March 12 while redirecting money toward artificial intelligence and enterprise sales, and Oracle was reported in January to be considering cuts of 20,000 to 30,000 jobs to free up cash for data-center expansion. (computerworld.com) That is why the hiring market feels strange right now: companies are spending heavily on artificial intelligence infrastructure while cutting payroll in adjacent teams. It is less like a recession where everyone stops buying, and more like a renovation where the owner rips out one floor to build a server room upstairs. (computerworld.com) Even people inside the artificial intelligence industry say the public story is messier than “robots took the jobs.” Cognizant Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Babak Hodjat told Nikkei Asia, as quoted by Yahoo Finance and TechSpot, that artificial intelligence can become a scapegoat when companies overhired or want to resize before real productivity gains have arrived. (finance.yahoo.com) (techspot.com) OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman used almost the same split-screen description at the India AI Impact Summit. He said some companies are “AI washing” old-fashioned layoffs, but he also said some displacement is real, which means workers are being hit by both a story problem and a technology problem at the same time. (techspot.com) The pressure is landing hardest on the bottom rung of the ladder. Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab found that early-career workers in jobs most exposed to artificial intelligence, including software engineering, marketing, and customer service, saw a 16% relative decline in employment even after adjusting for company-level effects. (hai.stanford.edu) That helps explain why junior candidates are hearing “we need experience” for jobs that used to train beginners. If software can now handle the first draft, the first report, or the first pass on customer replies, managers are more likely to pay for the person who can check the machine’s work and tie it to revenue. (hai.stanford.edu) The long-range forecasts are even harsher than the 2026 layoff numbers. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology report released in late 2025 estimated that existing artificial intelligence systems could replace 11.7% of the United States labor market, putting roughly $1.2 trillion in wages at risk across sectors including professional services, health care, and finance. (iceberg.mit.edu) (cnbc.com) Not every company is responding by cutting the entry door shut. IBM said last month that it is tripling entry-level hiring in 2026 for roles such as software developers after rewriting junior jobs around tasks that artificial intelligence cannot handle well, including customer interaction and judgment calls. (ibm.com) (techspot.com) So the thread running through these layoffs is not simply fewer jobs. It is a faster split between jobs that can show business results next quarter and jobs that still look like training grounds, and right now employers are protecting the first group more aggressively than the second. (hai.stanford.edu) (ibm.com)