In today’s business news, it feels like every week there’s a new headline about a tech company slashing jobs. As artificial intelligence (AI) gets smarter, companies are “downsizing” left and right, leaving workers worried about the future.
But before we blame robots for taking over the office, we should look back at the original king of the corporate axe. The record for the biggest layoff of all time doesn’t belong to a social media company in the 2020s. It belongs to a 1990s company that made typewriters and giant computers: IBM.
Back in 1993, IBM dropped a bomb on the business world by laying off 60,000 people in a single year. To this day, no other single-company layoff has beaten that number.
To understand why this happened, you have to understand how big and powerful IBM used to be. They weren’t just a company; they were the company. If you worked at IBM in the 1970s and 80s, you had a “job for life.”
Employees got great benefits, fancy company clubs and even gold watches after 25 years of service. You didn’t get fired from Big Blue—that just wasn’t something they did. They were the picture of stability.
But stability can turn into stubbornness. While IBM was busy building massive mainframe computers that filled entire rooms, the world was changing. Small, personal computers (PCs) from companies like Apple and Compaq were popping up on desks everywhere. IBM was slow to react and the world quickly decided it didn’t need a room-sized computer anymore.
By 1993, the company was in a coma. They announced a staggering loss of $8 billion in one year. It was one of the biggest corporate losses in American history at that time. The patient was dying, and they needed a new doctor.
IBM didn’t promote an insider to fix the problem. They hired an outsider named Louis Gerstner. Gerstner was known for being tough, and he had a brutal diagnosis for IBM: It was too fat and too slow.
He had to make the company lean enough to survive. That meant doing the unthinkable: cutting the very people IBM had promised lifetime security to. In July 1993, Gerstner swung the axe. Sixty thousand people lost their jobs.
What makes this layoff the “record holder” isn’t just the number, but the shock. These weren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet; they were people who had dedicated their entire careers to one company, believing they were part of a family. The family kicked them out.
You might wonder, with all the big tech layoffs we see today, why hasn’t Amazon, or Google, or Meta topped 60,000 in one go?
The answer is simple: Companies are terrified of looking that sick.
IBM’s 60,000 layoff was a sign of desperation. It screamed to the world, “We are failing.” Today, companies often do layoffs in waves—5,000 here, 10,000 there—to try to control the story and avoid the shock of one massive number.
Also, companies are structured differently now. In 1993, IBM was a behemoth that did everything. Today’s tech giants are big, but they rely heavily on contractors and part-time workers who don’t show up on the official layoff count. If you counted all the “hidden” workers, some modern layoffs might be bigger, but officially, IBM’s 1993 massacre remains the king.