Apple Fires Over 600 Workers From Silicon Valley Office In First Post-COVID Layoff By Company

A Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) Notice released on Friday revealed that Cupertino-based computer and tech firm Apple will be firing 614 employees from their Santa Clara offices, resulting in their first post-COVID layoff.

The San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, still reeling after tens of thousands of job cuts in 2022 and 2023 respectively, looked forward to a better 2024, with less job cuts, a better economy, and new growth industries such as AI helping revitalize the area. However, a little more than a few months into the new year, and 2024 is currently on pace to be just as bad as previous years in the Bay area. Multiple tech companies have already announced the firings of thousands of employees, with some companies getting rid of close to 2,000 employees in a single day. It also bled outside the tech sector, as Levi Strauss announced between 10-15% of their workforce, mostly in San Francisco, are to be fired this year. In February, firing continued, affecting tech firm Okta, who let go of 7% of their staff in San Francisco, Cisco with 4,000 job cuts, and the online form-filler company DocuSign, who laid off around 6% of their workforce, or 400 people in total.

The entire region also saw jobs in total decline, with San Francisco losing 21,000 positions in the last three months alone. Amidst the tens of thousands of cuts, one major tech company managed to avoid any cuts: Apple. Despite nearly all tech companies suffering cuts because of overhiring during the pandemic, Apple had never let go of any of their staff. In fact, the company had strong earnings during this time, with their stock price jumping up over $100 between early 2020 and early  2024. However, in recent months, there were warning signs that keeping a bloated staff was having some issues.

Apple Layoffs

In November, they recorded yet another quarterly loss in their smartphone division. And in January, Microsoft took over their former top spot as the most valuable company in the world, with the company reporting that their smartphones continued to be not selling as well, especially in the Chinese market. With problems piling on, the company gave notice to 614 employees in Santa Clara late last month that their jobs would be terminated on May 27th. A WARN notice was then filed on April, making the cuts public. While Apple has made cuts before, the last cuts the company made had been in the 2010’s.

As of Friday afternoon, Apple, nor Apple CEO Tim Cook, have given a statement on the cuts. However, tech and hiring experts have said that the pandemic over-hiring had finally caught up to Apple as they struggle in several key areas.

“Everyone has always thought Apple to be almost immune to having to fire a ton of people at once,” said Julie Ochs, a San Jose-based headhunter and hiring specialist told the Globe on Friday. “Do they fire people in general? Oh yes. But it really is never all at once like what happened here.”

“Even with issues, Apple had remained strong. Inflation went up, costs went up in Silicon Valley, and so man other factors have come up that cost other companies multiple rounds of employees being let go. I mean, in the last few years, all the titans had to do it, from Google to Meta. But Apple didn’t. During the pandemic, tech firms hired a ton of people because of the need for more tech services because of so many people working or studying from home, the number of people relying on apps going up, and basically people relying on tech to stay indoors. But as things cleared up, all those companies suddenly had bigger than needed companies and employees needed to be slashed down again.”

“Apple was an outlier for sometime, keeping those people on. But, as we saw today, economics finally caught up with them. All these pro-tech people could always point to Apple for the industry being strong, but that just faltered today. All this insane tech growth from the mid 2000’s to the early 2020’s hit a brick wall in the last several years, and Apple finally joined the rest of the pack. They’re still a very strong company, like Microsoft and Google. But they’re no longer invincible.”

Layoffs at Apple will be finalized on May 27th.