Laid off from Zoom.

What Zoom layoffs have meant for employees

Every organization at Zoom was to be affected, Eric Yuan’s February 7 message said, and leadership had also looked for functions that had grown overly complex or duplicative. In the US the news came by email, sent to both Zoom and personal inboxes within 30 minutes of the message. Each person cut was to hear from a leader in their organization offering a one-on-one check-in. Elsewhere, Zoom said it would tell people following local requirements. Its 8-K from that day said decisions on eliminating positions were subject, in certain countries, to local law and consultation rules, and it planned to be substantially through with the employee actions in its first fiscal 2024 quarter, subject to the same rules. So for anyone Zoom let go outside the US, the timing could depend on local rules.

The bill came in above Zoom's estimate. The 8-K put the plan's charges at $50 million to $68 million, primarily for employee transition, severance payments, benefits and stock-based compensation, while the 10-K note on restructuring records $73.0 million in net costs, $5 million past the top of that range. Of that, $54.4 million was for employee transition, severance payments and benefits, $17.3 million for stock-based compensation awards and $1.3 million for other expenses, all plan-level accounting totals. The note counts the plan complete as of July 31, 2023. Yuan and his leadership team gave up their FY23 corporate bonuses, while Zoom offered its departing full-time US staff their earned FY'23 annual bonus. The salary cuts at the top were temporary by the 8-K's account, with Yuan's base pay down 98% to $10,000 and other executive officers' down 20% for fiscal 2024.

Zoom explained the February 2024 cut in other terms. Zoom's spokesperson told CNBC that it regularly evaluates its teams to keep them aligned with its strategy, and Zoom said the layoffs weren't companywide while naming artificial intelligence, sales, product and operations as places it would keep hiring that year. Bloomberg, which reported the cut first, placed it in a wave of workforce reductions across tech companies at the start of 2024. In 2023 Yuan had called himself accountable for Zoom's mistakes, while the 2024 explanation came from a spokesperson and described routine evaluation.

Zoom's US workforce shrank faster than the company as a whole. At the end of January 2023, before the February cut, Zoom had 4,588 full-time employees in the US and 3,896 elsewhere, by its fiscal 2023 10-K. A year later the fiscal 2024 10-K showed the US count 791 lower and the international count 273 lower, and by January 2026 the US figure was 3,457 while the international one had climbed to 3,981, past where it began, by the fiscal 2026 filing. That first year's net drop of 1,064 fell mostly on the US side, and over the three counts US employees went from 54% of Zoom's full-time staff to 46%. These are net counts, so layoffs, resignations and new hires all show up in them together.

For the San Jose staff, the 2023 layoffs took effect the same day Zoom announced them, going by the effective date on California’s 2022-23 WARN report. If your claim is in California, there's more on the state's rules in California unemployment benefits. If weeks of employer healthcare were part of your package, you can arrange the next coverage before those weeks run out, using how COBRA works for the options.