Salesforce joins big tech layoffs, to cut 700 jobs: Report

Enterprise software major Salesforce has become the latest tech company to make job cuts, according to a media report on Friday.

The company is laying off around 700 employees, said a person familiar with its plans, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The layoffs comprise around 1 per cent of the roughly 70,000-person company that makes cloud-based customer relationship management software. 

One year ago, it cut 10 per cent of its workers or around 8,000 employees, amid pressure from investors to cut costs, the report said.

Owing to global macroeconomic conditions, Salesforce in January 2023, laid off 10 per cent of its workforce, impacting about 7,000 employees. The employees were laid off during a two-hour, all-hands meeting over a call.

In February, CEO Marc Benioff in an interview with The New York Times, said the call wasn't the best idea. 

He said it was “hard to have a call like that” and “we paid a price".

Salesforce joins Chinese short-video making app TikTok, Google, YouTube Amazon, Unity, and Discord in the Big Tech layoffs in 2024.

Google has laid off nearly 1,000 employees in several departments, including Google's hardware, central engineering teams, and Google Assistant.

The tech giant is reportedly slashing “a few hundred” more jobs in its advertising sales team as part of an ongoing restructuring exercise.

YouTube is also reportedly laying off at least 100 employees from its creator management and operations teams.

In just two weeks into the New Year, at least 46 IT and tech companies (including startups) have laid off more than 7,500 employees and the number is growing by the day, as generative AI (GenAI) threatens millions of jobs.

Tech companies, including startups, around the world fired more than 425,000 employees in 2022 and 2023, with more than 36,000 employees being sacked in India in the same time frame.