r/LayoffHedge

We’re only eight days into May, and the numbers are already devastating. 37,977 jobs have been wiped out across 16 major companies. This isn't just a "market adjustment" or "corporate restructuring" it's nearly 38,000 families suddenly wondering how they’re going to pay mortgage, buy groceries, or keep their healthcare.

The Scale of the Loss
• Spirit Airlines is undergoing a total workforce reduction, cutting 14,000 jobs (100%).

• Kyndryl has released 10,000 employees, accounting for 13.7% of their staff.

• PayPal has cut 4,760 positions, representing 20% of their workforce.

• Bill Holdings and The Daily Wire have seen massive percentage-based hits, at 30% and 50% respectively.

No Sector is Safe
From finance and tech to travel and media, the bleeding is everywhere:

• Fintech & Banking: Commerzbank (3,000), Fidelity (800), Fifth Third Bank (740), and Coinbase (700).

• Tech & Infrastructure: Cloudflare (1,100), Verizon (500), Freshworks (500), and Upwork (145).

• Entertainment & Cybersecurity: Ticketmaster (350), Cboe (332), and Arctic Wolf (250).

Behind every one of these 37,977 entries is a person who walked into work on May 1st thinking they were secure, only to be met with a "May Recap" that includes their livelihood. As AI and automation continue to shift the landscape, the "hedge" for the working class feels thinner than ever.

How many more recap posts like this can the economy take before it completely buckles?

Track every major layoff with us at Layoffhedge.com

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/11/gm-just-laid-off-hundreds-of-it-workers-to-hire-those-with-stronger-ai-skills/

The CEO is writing essays on shifting to AI agents, but a quick search on LinkedIn is showing multiple open jobs in India.

Is this actually just another company using AI as an excuse in 2026?

Monitoring.

This means they can file and hire an unlimited number of foreigners. While receiving billions in tax dollars and/or grants.

Here are the top abusers by year.

Search every university, every company, every county and learn more about our movement at:

https://layoffhedge.com/h1b

University of Michigan is the #1 employer filing for H-1B employees in the entire state of Michigan.

They also file 40% more than any other university nationwide.

How does a taxpayer-funded public university file so many H-1Bs? Well, because our laws exempt them from any cap.

We will continue to dive into H-1Bs at the university level, and will report back our findings.

Q2 2026 brought more blood.

We're 4 full months into the year, and our tracker is approaching 400,000 layoffs.

Here's your 30 day recap.

Spirit Airlines has confirmed they will be closing their doors for good. Which also includes 3,000 contractors out of a job as well.

Companies aren’t reinvesting savings into you and
everyone’s celebrating the AI productivity wave. Boards are thrilled. Margins are expanding. Stock buybacks are accelerating.

But let’s be honest about what’s actually happening.

When a company lays off 600 people and replaces them with AI tools, they have a choice: reinvest those savings into growth, new products, lower prices, or higher wages… or pocket it as margin expansion and call it a “strategic transformation.”

Guess which one they’re choosing.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

ZoomInfo just cut 20% of its workforce today. The stated reason? “Operational efficiency” and an “AI-first strategy.”
The real reason? Their core product, a database of business contacts, is being commoditized by AI tools that do the same thing for pennies. They’re not adopting AI. They’re running from it.

And they’re making their employees pay the exit fee.
This is the pattern: companies that built bloated cost structures during the zero-interest-rate era are now using AI as the justification — and the cover — for cuts they needed to make anyway. The AI narrative is clean. It sounds forward-thinking. It doesn’t sound like “we overhired and now the bill is due.”

The “Efficiency” Math Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s what $60M in annual labor savings actually looks like at a company like ZoomInfo:

• 600 jobs gone
• ~$60M back to the balance sheet
• Stock still down 90%+ from its 2021 peak
• Net Revenue Retention at 90% — meaning they’re losing existing customers faster than they’re replacing them

The AI pivot didn’t fix the product. It just made the bleeding cheaper. This is becoming the playbook across tech: cut humans, tout AI, guide to “margin improvement,” hope Wall Street prices in the transformation before the revenue decline becomes undeniable.

What This Means for the Labor Market

This isn’t just a ZoomInfo story. It’s the leading edge of a wave. Challenger, Gray & Christmas data shows 26% of April 2026 layoffs were explicitly attributed to AI-driven restructuring. That’s not a blip — that’s a new line item on the corporate P&L where your salary used to be.
The jobs being replaced aren’t coming back. They’re being reclassified as “operational leverage.”
And while the April jobs report headline read +115k, the household survey told a different story: 424k full-time positions lost, replaced by part-time work for people who couldn’t find anything better.

The economy isn’t creating jobs. It’s converting them — from careers into gigs, from salaries into contractor invoices, from employees into a cost center waiting to be optimized.

The Bottom Line

AI is a genuine technological shift. Nobody serious is denying that. But there’s a difference between companies using AI to build something new and companies using AI to justify something old: getting leaner at workers’ expense while margins flow upward.

Watch the NRR. Watch the full-time employment numbers. Watch whether the companies making these cuts are actually growing — or just shrinking more slowly.
Because right now, the AI efficiency boom has one clear winner… And it’s not you.

More on ZoomInfo May 11, 2026 workforce cut here:

https://layoffhedge.com/company/zoominfo

The April 2026 jobs report shows a massive split between the "headline" news and the underlying data. Here’s the breakdown of why people are debating it:

• The "Two-Survey" Gap:

The "Establishment Survey" (business payrolls) reported +115k jobs, but the "Household Survey" (actual people working) showed a loss of 226k workers.

• Full-Time vs. Part-Time Shift:

A huge red flag: Full-time jobs dropped by 424k, while part-time roles for "economic reasons" (people who want full-time work but can't find it) surged by 445k. This suggests the "growth" is just people settling for lower-quality work. 

• The "Birth/Death" Adjustment:

The BLS added 391k jobs via a statistical model that estimates new business startups. Critics call this a gimmick that overestimates growth during economic downturns, effectively masking real losses. When this occurs it is commonly referred to as “phantom jobs.” The BLS eventually corrects these estimates through a process called benchmarking. Once a year, they compare their survey-based estimates with near-exhaustive counts from unemployment insurance records.
These revisions happen with a significant delay. If the April 2026 report is being heavily inflated by the Birth/Death model today, the public may not see the "real" (lower) numbers until the annual benchmark revision in early 2027

• The AI Factor:

While healthcare and retail added jobs, the Information/Tech sector lost 13k. Reports (like Challenger, Gray & Christmas) suggest 26% of April’s layoffs were attributed to AI-driven restructuring, marking the start of a "labor adjustment cycle" where companies swap human staff for automation. 

Bottom Line: The economy looks okay on paper (+115k), but the "quality" of the labor market is deteriorating, with full-time careers being replaced by part-time gigs and AI-driven automation. This ultimately will not be sustainable for long term economic growth.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/tech/926893/meta-employees-are-reportedly-miserable-between-looming-layoffs-and-ai-push

2015 - 2025. 6,932,647 applications.

73% from India = over 5M from a single country.

12 of the top 20 employers are middlemen/body shops. 6 are doing LAYOFFS. Fraud and abuse everywhere. The video breaks it down.

AMERICANS WANT OUR JOBS BACK.

GAMESTOP OFFERING TO BUY EBAY FOR $125 A SHARE (per WSJ)

Cohen took GameStop from 14,000 employees in 2020 to 4,000 in 2026.

Expect DEEP cuts at eBay if this goes through

5 years ago Gamestop almost went out of business. The GME squeeze by WSB saved them. Now they are at a point to potentially buy ebay. Gamestop cut their employee count by almost 70%.

Do you think this would affect how much product hits the shelves for collectors if it goes through? Should it be allowed? Where do collector items such as sports cards and Pokemon cards go from here if the acquisition is finalized?

What about the employee count at ebay?

Thoughts????

700 people. 14% of staff.

Read the CEO's email. It's the Oracle playbook.

Same early morning email. Same blame on AI. Same global scale.

The only difference is they included vesting in the severance package, avoiding Oracle's PR disaster.

Brian Armstrong's Coinbase memo said the company would now concentrate around "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents."

Justin Briley posted on LinkedIn this morning that Coinbase laid him off.

His professional focus: AI Systems Management

His previous companies: Meta, LinkedIn, Roku, Infor, Stanley Black & Decker.

His current degree: first cohort of Georgetown's AI Management masters program.

He is the exact talent Armstrong said Coinbase wants. He is also one of the 700 they cut.

So what's the real story behind the layoff?

Heres a link to the email they sent out to the laid off employees.

https://x.com/brian\_armstrong/status/2051616759145185723?s=46

On May 7, 2026, Cloudflare co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn announced on the official Cloudflare blog that the company was reducing its workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally. The cuts represent roughly one in five Cloudflare employees, taking the company from a reported 5,156 headcount down to approximately 4,000. It is the largest reduction in Cloudflare's history.

The announcement was framed not as a financial response but as a deliberate operating-model change. The post is titled "Building for the Future," and the leadership message centers on what the founders call an "agentic AI-first operating model." The reduction is intended to be substantially complete by the end of Q3 2026.

Check out more on this here:

https://layoffhedge.com/company/cloudflare

Fifth Third Bancorp closed its $10.9 billion acquisition of Comerica on February 1, 2026, creating the 9th largest bank in the United States with about $294 billion in assets. CEO Tim Spence has set a target of $850 million in total cost savings from the combination, with reductions described by the bank as "concentrated in overhead and noncustomer-facing roles." On the January earnings call, CFO Bryan Preston flagged roughly $400 million of expense reductions to land in 2026.

With the CEO stating he wants ~$850M in cost savings, we expect much deeper cuts across more states in the coming months.

For more information, check it out here:

https://layoffhedge.com/company/fifth-third-bank