California tech giant plots massive layoffs as industry sheds 14,000 jobs - New York Post

Good news from the world of corporate communications: Bending Spoons, the Italian conglomerate that owns Airtable, will be letting go of a "large part" of its workforce — a disclosure delivered not by a press release, an earnings call or a filing, but by an X post from Federico Simionato, a product leader at the parent company. Nothing says "we have thought carefully about this" quite like a product guy with a posting habit. "A large part" is doing magnificent work there — vague enough to mean a third, precise enough to mean your desk. The owner of Airtable, a firm whose entire pitch is that teams work better together, has concluded that rather fewer of them need to.

The company did supply something approaching a rationale earlier this year: "The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce." Read it twice, because it repays the effort. "Have resulted" is a confession. "May continue to result" is a subscription. In one sentence, Bending Spoons has admitted it has already cut people for AI and announced that the cutting is now a permanent feature of the operating model, which is a curious thing to say out loud in a document designed to reassure.

Meanwhile the New York Post's headline calls this outfit a "California tech giant", while the article's own first sentence calls it Italian — an editorial geography flexible enough to find a scapegoat on whichever coast is polling worse. The number that should stop you is the one underneath: Bay Area tech layoffs in 2026 have already topped the whole of 2025, over 14,000 jobs, and we are barely into October. Fourteen thousand individual decisions, aggregated into a rounding error with a chart attached. Somewhere a dashboard is green.