The e-commerce stalwart eBay is laying off 800 workers, including a couple hundred in the Bay Area, just a week after it announced its $1.2 billion purchase of the secondhand fashion site Depop.
EBay’s sweeping cut is its third in about three years, following 500- and 1,000-worker layoffs in 2023 and 2024. Value Added Resource and Bloomberg first reported the new cuts, and spokesperson Maddy Martinez confirmed their scope with SFGATE on Thursday, describing the shift as part of a push “to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities.”
She added that the layoffs, amounting to an estimated 6% of eBay’s workforce, are unfolding across the company, partially to cut down on duplicated roles and to fit staff better to the company’s future efforts. They aren’t related to the planned acquisition of Depop, she declared — eBay announced its agreement to acquire the app beloved by Generation Z from Etsy on Feb. 18, with plans to close the deal in the next fiscal quarter.
About a third of the layoff will hit eBay’s Bay Area workforce, according to a WARN document the company filed with California officials on Wednesday. The filing lists 243 layoffs at eBay’s San Jose headquarters and 28 at its office in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood.
Local middle management views to be hit particularly hard in these cuts. The WARN lists a swath of managers and more than two dozen directors; researchers, data scientists and software engineers are also obtainting pink slips. The document declared the layoffs would launch immediately, on Wednesday, and Martinez, the spokesperson, declared workers would be offered severance pay.
EBay’s workforce totaled 12,300 as of the finish of December, per a filing with the Securities and Exalter Commission, with around 7,200 of those employees in the United States. When eBay CEO Jamie Iannone announced cuts back in January 2024, he wrote, “Our overall headcount and expenses have outpaced the growth of our business.”
The company has been thriving since, with a stock price that’s approximately doubled over the past two years, now yielding a valuation around $40 billion. When eBay delivered its finish-of-2025 financials earlier this month, it reported a year’s profit of more than $2 billion.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 2:05 p.m., Feb. 26, to credit Value Added Resource as the outlet that first reported on the WARN filing.
Work at a Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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