There have now been over 25,000 layoffs across nearly 100 tech companies in the first month of the year, with fintech giant PayPal this week announcing 2,500 jobs will be cut.

PayPal announced earlier this week that it would be shedding about nine per cent of its total workforce due to increasing competition and profit pressures, as Bloomberg reported.

The cutting of 2,500 jobs will “right-size” the company, while open roles being advertised this year will also be slashed, the company’s CEO Alex Chriss said.

“Across our organisation, we need to drive more focus and efficiency, deploy automation, and consolidate our technology to reduce complexity and duplication,” Chriss said.

The company will “continue to invest in areas of the business we believe will create and accelerate growth”, Chriss said.

PayPal’s layoffs are hot on the heels of Microsoft which confirmed it would be sacking 1,900 workers from its gaming division in an effort to reduce “areas of overlap”.

The job cuts, which came just months after the tech giant finalised its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, are in a bid to reduce “areas of overlap”, and were followed by the departure of a number of C-suite executives.

The 1,900 roles equate to eight per cent of Microsoft’s gaming division workforce, and the company is aiming to reach a sustainable cost structure in the long term.

It continues a series of tech job cuts at the start of 2024, with tracking site Layoffs.fyi reporting that there have been more than 25,000 layoffs across nearly 100 tech companies in the first month of the year alone.

Companies that have announced significant layoffs this year also include Google, Amazon, Twitch, eBay and Discord.

According to a New York Times report, these job cuts are taking a different form than those that took place in tech companies across last year in a realignment following rapid and unsustainable growth during the Covid pandemic.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dubbed 2023 the “year of efficiency”, and there were about 260,000 tech jobs lost across more than 1,000 companies, according to layoffs.fyi.

The likes of Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon all shed tens of thousands of jobs, and saw their stock prices rapidly increase by the end of the year, proving they could continue to operate effectively.

The latest round of job losses at some of the world’s biggest tech companies have been more targeted, with these firms looking to zero-in on specific projects and shift resources into products like artificial intelligence.

According to the Times report, the “stigma” of job cuts also no longer exists, with tech companies now readily admitting they over-hired during the pandemic and making changes to address this.

Meta laid off about a third of its employees last year, focusing on “managers managing managers”, according to Zuckerberg. The company has made further cuts this year, but focusing specifically on “technical program manager” roles at Instagram.

Google has also made cuts this year across its hardware, core engineering, and Google Assistant teams, with at least 1,000 people losing their jobs. This was done to “remove layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas”, the tech giant said.

eBay has announced 1,000 job cuts to help it become more “nimble”, while Amazon has laid off “several hundreds” of employees in its Prime Video division and at MGM studios.

Discord has also laid off 170 employees or 17 per cent of its total workforce, and Twitch has cut 500 jobs, equating to 35 per cent of its employees.