Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid in the first weeks of 2024. What's going on?

People walk past a Microsoft office in New York in 2016. Big Tech companies, like Google and Microsoft, and dozens of smaller startups have collectively shed more than 20,000 workers so far this year. (Swayne B. Hall/AP)

Last year was, by all accounts, a bloodbath for the tech industry, with more than 260,000 jobs vanishing — the worse 12 months for Silicon Valley since the dot-com crash of the early 2000s.

Executives justified the mass layoffs by citing a pandemic hiring binge, high inflation and weak consumer demand.