Some of the biggest names in tech have unleashed layoffs over the past few days. Is this a bad sign for the tech industry as a whole?

Expedia, Waymo, LinkedIn, Bandcamp, and Stack Overflow have all made significant cuts to their workforces since October 15. That follows layoffs at the start of the month by Meta, Twitch, Blue Origin, and Qualcomm (among others), according to crowdsourced data available on layoffs.fyi.

Spokespeople at these companies have blamed the cutbacks on everything from economic pressures to the need to pare down oversized teams. “Our focus for this fiscal year and into the next is profitability and that, along with macroeconomic pressures led to today’s changes,” read a note from Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow. Meanwhile, Waymo framed its cuts as “part of the normal course of business.”

While the total numbers are still unclear, the cumulative layoffs probably total in the hundreds. That’s a far cry from the beginning of 2023, when economic uncertainty drove tech giants such as Google, Salesforce, Meta and Microsoft to cut tens of thousands of jobs. Some of those companies are beginning to aggressively re-hire; Salesforce, for example, plans on hiring 3,300 new employees, including critical roles in data cloud and engineering.

Meanwhile, tech unemployment remains historically low at 2.2 percent in September, according to the latest CompTIA analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That’s a slight increase from August, when the rate stood at 2.1 percent, and still remains below the national unemployment rate of 3.8 percent.

But CompTIA also saw reasons for caution in that data. “There is no sugar-coating the off month of tech employment data,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer, CompTIA, wrote in a statement. “Despite the persistently high demand for tech skills on many fronts and positive forward-looking projections, there is a lag in hiring at the moment."

After highs earlier this year, tech layoffs have decreased and plateaued to a relatively low level, albeit with spikes in certain subindustries. In August and September, a generalized need to cut costs led to layoffs among some of the most prominent names in video game developers, for instance.   

So what’s happening here? While the macroeconomic data suggests the tech industry is in good shape, many companies seem to be adjusting their headcount in response to cost or economic concerns. Remember, it’s always a good idea to keep your resume up-to-date.