KUALA LUMPUR (May 7): More than 139,690 workers at US-based tech companies have been laid off in mass job cuts so far in 2023.

In a report on Friday (May 5), Crunchbase, which tracks trends, investments and news of global companies from start-ups to the Fortune 1000, said there were a lot of repeat names in the layoffs tracker in May.

It said layoffs more than doubled compared to last week, in no small part thanks to Shopify’s massive, 2,300-person layoff that slashed 20% of its workforce. It’s not the first time the e-commerce giant cut employees — in July, Shopify laid off 1,000 people (a move that carved off 10% of its employees).

Same goes for Unity, the games development software firm, it said.

Since June, the company has gone through three massive layoffs in which more than 1,100 employees were cut cumulatively.

And Brightline, the medtech platform that provides behavioral health services, announced its second layoff this week, six months after their first one.

Crunchbase said it is a huge shift from the perception of layoffs that long existed before the recent economic downturn.

“Cut once, cut big” was the philosophy employed by most startup advisers and large companies.

The idea was to conduct layoffs only once to minimise anxiety for remaining employees.

The firm said that has not really been the case since last year. Companies as large as Salesforce have announced multiple rounds of layoffs that slashed a significant amount of their workforces.

It said this makes it even harder to determine when, exactly, layoffs will end. Predictors that once existed no longer apply.