LinkedIn, the company that manages the world’s largest professional network, announced it would let 668 workers go on Monday.

It was not the first time LinkedIn informed the public of massive layoffs in 2023, and the company is not the only big company to do so.

“Talent changes are a difficult, but necessary and regular part of managing our business. The changes we shared with our team today will result in a reduction of approximately 668 roles across our engineering, product, talent and finance teams,” LinkedIn’s statement read in part on Monday.

“While we are adapting our organizational structures and streamlining our decision making, we are continuing to invest in strategic priorities for our future and to ensure we continue to deliver value for our members and customers. We are committed to providing our full support to all impacted employees during this transition and ensuring that they are treated with care and respect.”

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This 3 percent reduction in LinkedIn’s global workforce follows its 716 layoffs in May.

Also, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive officer, said that his company took the most difficult changes in its history in November 2022. By the turn of 2023, those changes included over 11,000 people losing their jobs.

“I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1,” Zuckerberg told Meta staff in November.

By May, Meta, the social media parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had done away with those 11,000 workers.

Zuckerberg’s explanation for Meta’s big job cuts pointed at his company’s mistakes and a wrong call on what could have followed major work disruption during the COVID pandemic.

“At the start of COVID, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments,” Zuckerberg said.

“Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that. In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient.

“We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse. We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go.”

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Meta announced more thousands of layoffs in the first week of October.

Other big companies such as Amazon and Google had to lay thousands of employees off in a similar fashion this year. Amazon announced at least 27,000 of its workforce laid off in 2023, while Google axed at least 12,000 jobs in January.

“We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices,” Sundar Pichai, Alphabet and Google CEO, said while explaining why the layoffs happened.

“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today. I am confident about the huge opportunity in front of us thanks to the strength of our mission, the value of our products and services, and our early investments in AI. To fully capture it, we’ll need to make tough choices. So, we’ve undertaken a rigorous review across product areas and functions to ensure that our people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company. The roles we’re eliminating reflect the outcome of that review. They cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions.”

In what LinkedIn has called the Great Reshuffle, companies are rethinking everything about work. This includes entire working models, cultures, company values and innovation.

The trend across these companies shows that they are investing more in artificial intelligence and working to spend less on employee management.

Big companies are exploring AI-powered products to drive strategic corporate actions such as recruitment, marketing, research and resource management. This comes at the expense of thousands of roles involved.