PayPal to lay off nearly 2,000 employees

Caps off a rough month for tech companies

Digital payments platform PayPal is set to lay off nearly 2,000 full-time employees in the latest round of tech sector job cuts.

In a statement posted online PayPal's President and CEO, Dan Schulman, announced that the company will make 7% of its employees redundant in the coming weeks as a result of the "challenging macro-economic environment."

"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," he said. "We must continue to change as our world, our customers, and our competitive landscape evolve."

Although Schulman said laid-off workers will be treated with "the utmost respect and empathy," he did not share details of severance packages further than calling them "generous." Neither did he provide any information on the teams that will be most affected.

PayPal owns a variety of subsidiaries: PayPal Credit, Swift Financial, Braintree, Venmo, Xoom, Zettle, Simility, Chargehound, Happy Returns, Honey, Hyperwallet and Paidy. All are in the financial space in some way, mostly either credit, loan/funding or payment platforms.

A spokesperson for the company referred enquiries back to Schulman's statement, but declined to comment further.

The PayPal layoffs are part of a wider trend of job losses in the tech sector. In the last six months several firms, mostly US-based, have laid off thousands of staff. They include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, SAP, Twitter, Meta, Twilio, Arm, Tesla, PagerDuty, Spotify, Citrix and Tibco.

In total, the recent cuts have affected around 75,000 tech sector roles, if we include moves that have been announced but not yet implemented.