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Ride-sharing service Lyft has become the latest tech company to lay off staff, while Amazon said it would suspend new hires across its business operations as tech companies cut back to deal with the economic downturn.
Lyft, a rival of Uber, announced on Thursday that it was cutting 683 jobs – 13% of its 4,000 employees – in a bid to cut costs.
“We worked hard to drive down costs this summer: we slowed, then froze hiring; decrease spending ; and paused less critical initiatives. Yet Lyft needs to get leaner, which forces us to part ways with amazing team members,” Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer said in a memo to staff.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the ride-hailing company said the layoffs would cost it between $27 million and $32 million in restructuring costs and severance.
The layoffs at Lyft, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, are the second round of cuts in recent months for the ride-sharing company. The company announced that it would sell its auto service business.
The news came after payments group Stripe said it would cut about 14 percent of its workforce to prepare for “learning times”.
Separately, Beth Galetti, director of recruiting at Amazon, told employees that the company will be pausing “incremental new hires to our corporate workforce” in an effort to “balance our hiring and investments while thinking about this economy”.
The job losses and pause in hiring are a sign of how darkening economic conditions are forcing tech companies to cut costs and build buffers to deal with slowing consumer spending.
Learn more about the tech slowdown here.
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