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Spotify Adds To Big Tech Layoffs With Highest Job Cuts Since 2000

The popular music streaming company has seen its share price fall by nearly half over the past 12 months.

Published

3 years ago

January 24, 2023

Nour Nasir

spotify adds to big tech layoffs with highest job cuts since 2000

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Swedish music streaming giant, Spotify, is set to cut 6% of its entire workforce — a move which will amount to laying off around 600 employees.

The cuts come as part of efforts to increase efficiencies in a “challenging macro environment”, the tech company announced on Monday, January 23rd. Spotify reported net losses of $181 million in the third quarter of 2022, compared with a $2 million profit the year before, with share prices falling by a monumental 49% in a single year.

Spotify was forced to take the decision after soaring costs and growing operational expenditure began to rapidly outpace revenue generation, and followed the firing of 38 staff from Gimlet Media and Parcast podcast studios in October, which are also owned by the Swedish streaming service.

“In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth,” admitted chief executive Daniel Ek. “That would have been unsustainable long-term in any climate, but with a challenging macro environment, it would be even more difficult to close the gap”.

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Ek went on to confirm that chief content officer Dawn Ostroff would also be leaving the company, whose workforce numbered 9,800 employees in mid-2022.

A total of 97,171 jobs were axed in the technology sector in 2022, a 649% increase over 2021 and the highest since the fateful dot-com crash of the early 2000s. Spotify’s layoffs mirror those of other corporations in the technology sector, including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google’s Alphabet. Part of those cuts can be explained by the extra hires required during the height of the Covid pandemic, though rising interest rates and growing fears of a recession are also influencing the somber atmosphere.

News

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 9 And Ultra 2 Specs Leak Ahead Of Unpacked

An 800mAh Ultra 2 battery and a switch from Exynos to Qualcomm silicon headline the expected changes for Samsung’s next smartwatches.

Published

9 hours ago

July 15, 2026

Nour Nasir

samsung's galaxy watch 9 and ultra 2 specs leak ahead of unpacked

Samsung’s next smartwatches have little left to hide. A new leak reported by Android Authority has surfaced most of the remaining details about the Galaxy Watch 9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra 2, just over a week before the company’s Galaxy Unpacked event on July 22.

The biggest change is an invisible one: Samsung is expected to drop its own Exynos W1000 chip in favor of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite SW6100, a chipset unveiled only this year, according to the outlet.

Battery capacity looks like the other notable upgrade. Citing a report from Winfuture, Android Authority says the Watch Ultra 2 could reach 800mAh, well beyond the 590mAh cell in the current Watch Ultra. The 44mm Watch 9 reportedly gets a 445mAh cell — the same capacity as last year’s Watch 8 Classic — while the 40mm model stays at 325mAh.

The 40mm Watch 9 will reportedly feature a 438 x 438-pixel panel, with the 44mm Watch 9 and the Watch Ultra 2 sharing a larger 480 x 480-pixel screen. Samsung leaker Ice Universe has separately claimed the Ultra 2’s display could reach a peak brightness of 5,000 nits. RAM and storage vary by model, topping out at 2GB and 64GB.

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The Ultra 2 keeps its titanium case and 100-meter water resistance; the standard Watch 9 remains aluminum, rated to 5 ATM. All models are said to include Bluetooth 6.0, NFC, and dual-band WiFi, with the usual LTE variants, and ship with One UI 9 Watch running on Wear OS 7.

A separate leak puts the Galaxy Watch 9 at €409 (about $468) for the 40mm Bluetooth model, rising to €489 (about $560) for the 44mm LTE version, with the Watch Ultra 2 LTE at €749 (about $857) — figures Android Authority said were partially corroborated by Winfuture. Confirmation arrives on stage on July 22.