PayPal to lay off 2,000 full-time employees, about 7% of its workforce

PayPal announced Tuesday that it will be eliminating 7% of its workforce or 2,000 employees as tech layoffs mount. The payments giant becomes the latest in a list of fintech firms to be hit by the global economic slowdown.

PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman said in a release posted on its website that the company is working to address the “challenging macroeconomic environment.” He added that the company has made progress in focusing resources on core priorities and rightsizing its cost structure, but that there is more work to be done

“Over the past year, we made significant progress in strengthening and reshaping our company to address the challenging macroeconomic environment while continuing to invest to meet our customers’ needs. While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost structure and focused our resources on our core strategic priorities, we have more work to do. We must continue to change as our world, our customers, and our competitive landscape evolves,” Schulman said in a statement.

He continued: “Addressing these changes requires us to make hard decisions that will impact some of our colleagues. Today, I’m writing to share the difficult news that we will be reducing our global workforce by approximately 2,000 full-time employees, which is about 7% of our total workforce.”

The layoff is expected to occur in the coming weeks, with some organizations impacted more than others. PayPal said the affected employees will receive generous packages and engage in consultation necessary to support them with their transitions.

The announcement comes just a day after The Financial Times reported that Elon Musk planned to build a Twitter payments system to compete with PayPal.

PayPal now joins other tech companies that have announced layoffs in recent weeks. Just last week, Microsoft also said it would lay off 10,000 jobs instead of the 11,000 reported by major news outlets. In addition to the layoff, the Redmond-based company also said that it would take a  $1.2-billion charge as its cloud-computing customers dissect their spending and the company braces for a potential recession. The layoff is far larger than the 1,000 job cuts the company announced back in October 2020.

With just four weeks into 2023, more than 241 tech companies have laid off 77,916 tech workers, according to Layoffs.FYI, a site that has been tracking all tech layoffs using data compiled from public reports.