Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Apple collectively added nearly one million employees between 2019 and 2022. Since then, hiring has slowed significantly, but overall headcounts across the companies have stayed close to their peak levels, according to a report by Business Insider.
The hiring boom was driven by expectations that remote work and e-commerce would permanently reshape the economy.
“In 2022, there was hyperinvestment, thinking that work from home was going to be absolutely transformative,” Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Niche, told Business Insider. “There is a little bit of ‘We have to capitalize on this now, or we’re going to miss out.’ FOMO is very real in the tech sector.”
Since 2022, hiring has slowed sharply, and the companies have collectively cut more than 100,000 jobs, according to data from Layoffs. fyi. Despite these layoffs, workforce sizes have remained broadly stable.
One reason is scale. The companies had expanded so rapidly during the pandemic that even large layoffs have had a limited impact. Amazon’s 14,000 layoffs announced in October, for example, represented less than one percent of its total workforce at the end of 2024.
In some cases, layoffs have been offset by continued hiring. Amazon ended 2025 with 20,000 more employees than it had the previous year, despite earlier cuts.
Meta is the only company among the five with a smaller workforce than at the end of the 2022 hiring surge, though it has grown again since downsizing in 2023. In 2025, the company hired across areas including monetization, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and regulatory functions.
Microsoft’s overall head count has also remained largely unchanged, though its workforce composition has shifted. The company added around 3,000 roles in operations, including product support, consulting, and data center work, while reducing roles in product development, sales, and administrative functions.
Looking ahead, artificial intelligence is expected to play a key role in shaping hiring decisions.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said efficiency gains from AI could “reduce” the size of the company’s corporate workforce over time, even as it continues to hire in strategic areas.
At Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is already seeing changes in how work is structured.
“We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” he said on a recent earnings call.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has suggested that headcount could grow again as employees adapt to AI tools. However, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said in a recent interview that most tasks in white-collar jobs could be automated within the next 18 months.
Despite the focus on AI, uncertainty in the broader economy continues to influence hiring decisions.
“We’ve been in this frozen place for quite a while,” Shrivastava said, adding that clearer signals around trade policy, AI, and immigration would be needed before companies significantly expand hiring again.
David Adubiina
