eBay Cuts 1,000 Jobs in Second Layoff Round This Year
The company is trimming 9% of its workforce just eight months after a similar cut, even as it pours money into AI and digests a $1.4 billion acquisition.
eBay is laying off roughly 1,000 employees, about 9% of its workforce, the company confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday. It's the second time this year the e-commerce company has shed staff at this scale, and the pattern says a lot about where eBay thinks its future is headed.
A company spokesperson framed the cuts as a repositioning move, saying in a statement that the goal is to align "teams and resources with our top strategic priorities" so the company can "operate from a position of strength." eBay also said it plans to keep hiring in what it called "priority areas aligned with our strategy" — meaning this isn't a straightforward retreat so much as a reshuffling of where the money and headcount go.
Reuters first broke the news, citing an internal memo from CEO Jamie Iannone. "Our strategy is working," Iannone reportedly wrote, adding that capturing the opportunity in front of the company "requires us to make thoughtful choices about where we focus and invest."
That opportunity-and-discipline framing is notable because it's nearly identical to what eBay said back in February, when it cut about 800 jobs — a 6% reduction at the time. Stack the two rounds together and eBay has eliminated close to 1,800 positions in under a year. The company closed 2025 with about 12,300 employees, so this latest cut alone would trim headcount by roughly another tenth.
A years-long slimdown, now accelerating
This isn't a sudden pivot. eBay has been steadily shrinking its workforce for several years, even as the company increases spending on artificial intelligence. That combination — fewer people, more AI investment — is becoming a familiar script across tech, but eBay's willingness to run two major layoff rounds in a single calendar year suggests the company sees more urgency than most in reshaping its cost structure quickly rather than gradually.
What's harder to tell from the outside is exactly which teams are shrinking and which are growing. eBay's statement pointed to "fastest-growing areas" as the beneficiaries of this reallocation, but didn't specify what those are. The AI spending trend, paired with the language about strategic priorities, points toward the company funneling resources into automation and AI-driven product work at the expense of other functions — a pattern plenty of other large tech employers have followed this year.
The Depop wrinkle
The timing is also worth sitting with because eBay just finished absorbing a significant acquisition. In July, the company closed a $1.4 billion deal to buy Depop, the used-clothing resale platform, from Etsy. Depop carries a loyal Gen Z and millennial user base — exactly the younger shopper demographic that eBay, a 30-year-old marketplace built around auctions and secondhand goods, has had a harder time reaching organically.
Buying growth in one place while cutting headcount in another isn't unusual for a company trying to modernize its business, but it does underline the throughline here: eBay isn't just trying to get smaller, it's trying to get sharper about where it spends. The Depop deal represents a bet on where new customers are, and the layoffs represent a bet on how lean the rest of the operation needs to be to support that.
Investors, for their part, didn't flinch. eBay shares were up about 1% Wednesday morning following the news, a modest but notable sign that Wall Street is reading these cuts as discipline rather than distress.
The bigger question is whether a second major layoff within a year marks the end of this restructuring phase or just another step in it. eBay's own language — hiring in priority areas while cutting everywhere else — suggests the company isn't done recalibrating. Whether that recalibration produces the growth eBay says it's chasing will be the thing to watch in the quarters ahead.
