San Francisco businesses eliminated more than 10,000 permanent positions in 2023, with tech giants and retail chains leading a relentless series of mass layoffs that reshaped the city’s workforce.
The cuts arrived through 29 separate events affecting at least 100 workers each, spanning industries from cloud software to department stores. Salesforce, Google, and Meta delivered the heaviest blows, yet closure-driven job losses at Gap and Nordstrom proved that brick-and-mortar retail also suffered deeply.
Under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, any company eliminating 50 or more jobs must file paperwork with the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Those WARN notices, obtained through public records, document 10,200 permanent layoffs across the year. The actual total likely runs higher, since the filings exclude smaller reductions and sometimes misattribute remote workers.
January and February brought the worst stretch: nearly 3,500 workers lost jobs across 28 mass layoff events. October marked the quietest month with just 294 cuts across three notices.
Salesforce, the city’s largest private employer, kicked off the wave on January 4 with 752 layoffs. Another 258 followed in February, then 141 more in March. CEO Marc Benioff later pointed to hiring rebounds and returning “boomerang” employees as evidence of recovery.
Google shed 630 San Francisco workers in January, plus 75 more in September. Meta cut 146 in April and another 311 weeks later. Cruise eliminated 474 positions in December. Flexport, Splunk, Lyft, LinkedIn, Unity Software, Nextdoor, Spotify, Dropbox, Glassdoor, Atlassian, Twilio, Pinterest, Autodesk, Scale AI, Niantic, Zendesk, Amazon, and Invitae all filed notices too.
Retail accounted for more than 1,600 job losses. Gap’s corporate office and Nordstrom’s store shutdowns drove the largest share. Safeway, Target, and Pacific Supermarket each laid off roughly 60 workers. Wells Fargo, Bank of the West, and JPMorgan Chase also cut San Francisco-based staff.
The pattern shows no sign of fading. On January 10, 2024, Google eliminated 105 more positions in the city.
