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The first quarter of 2026 has seen massive layoffs across global tech and multinational companies, with over 61,000 jobs lost worldwide, including thousands in India. Oracle led the cuts with 30,000 jobs, followed by Amazon, Dell, Block Inc., Epic Games, and Salesforce.

Hyderabad: A series of layoffs by different tech giants and multinational companies have swept through the first quarter of 2026, with globally around 61,000 jobs, several thousands of them in India, cut as the companies are increasingly shifting towards artificial intelligence that is replacing the workforce.

The largest job cut has come from Oracle, a multinational technology company, which reduced its global workforce by 30,000, including around 12,000 jobs in India. The layoffs, according to the company, are part of organisational restructuring amid focus on its cloud and AI infrastructure business.

Prior to Oracle, 2026 commenced with Amazon cutting around 16,000 jobs as part of its restructuring and AI-focus. The layoffs also impacted the company’s robotics division. This was the second such mass layoff since October last, when the company reduced staff by 14,000.

While some companies are publicly announcing reduction of their workforce, a few like Dell Technologies silently cut about 11,000 jobs worldwide during the fiscal year 2026. This reduction, as per reports, is 10 percent of its total staff, which has gone down from 1,08,000 in January 2024 to 97,000 as of January 2026.

Joining the layoffs is the Block Inc. (formerly Square), a fintech company, which announced 4,000 jobs cut. The company cited advances in AI as its main reason for downsizing the staff. Epic Games, a video game and software company, and Salesforce, a cloud-based software company, announced layoffs of 1,000 and 1,500 respectively, with similar reasons.

These mass layoffs have put professionals under serious stress and anxiety besides financial constraints due to sudden income loss and uncertain future, while in services are insecure about their job.

They are flooding social media with posts of anxiety, fear of job loss, financial stress and family issues. A Reddit user sk123_4243 posted “Laid off after 9 years for the only company I’ve ever worked (for), feeling lost”.

Another user posted stating that they were laid off twice in the last three months. “I was laid off in January from a tech company after working there for 23 months then joined a warehouse (be..) cause I can’t afford to sit at home and now they got rid of half of their staff as well, including me. Honestly, I am so tired of this, I don’t even want to work for anyone unless I get job security,” the user posted.

More layoffs in the offing as over 100 other companies from Amazon, Nike to Verizon, have filed legally mandated WARN (worker adjustment and retraining notification), which are given before large layoffs in the US, about job cuts to come in 2026, according to the WARN Tracker. Citibank has already announced its plans of cutting down its headcount by 10 percent or 20,000 employees in 2026.

Further, Heineken, a multinational brewing company, is planning to cut down its workforce by 5,000 to 6,000 over the next two years. This is aimed at boosting productivity and bringing down costs.