Seattle’s long tech boom is suddenly looking fragile, and the anxiety is no longer confined to software engineers refreshing their inboxes. A cascade of layoffs, stalled hiring and shifting tax and real estate dynamics is forcing the region to confront how dependent its broader prosperity has become on a single sector. The question hanging over the city now is whether this reset becomes a short, painful correction or the start of a deeper economic slide.
For a metro that has branded itself around innovation, the current shakeout is exposing structural fault lines in everything from downtown retail to housing. I see a city that still has enviable assets, but also one that is learning in real time what happens when a tech-heavy economy hits the brakes.
The layoff wave that jolted Seattle’s confidence
The immediate trigger for the current panic is the scale and speed of job cuts at the giants that helped define modern Seattle. On Wednesday, Amazon told employees it would eliminate 16,000 corporate roles across the organization, on top of earlier cuts that removed another 14,000 positions. Separate reporting indicates that Amazon has already shed 2,100 corporate employees in Washington in the latest round, bringing local cuts since Octob to 5,400. For a company that once seemed to hire entire graduating classes at a time, the reversal is stark.
Amazon is not alone. The first major tech layoff of 2026 hit Meta workers in the region, where About 330 roles were eliminated and local unemployment climbed above 5 percent. January has been described as a rough month for Seattle-area tech workers, with hundreds of confirmed job cuts at Amazon and mounting reports of more reductions to take effect March 20. When I look across these numbers, the common thread is a sudden loss of the job security that once defined life inside the region’s marquee employers.
From boom to “gloom” in a tech-dependent city
The psychological shift has been just as dramatic as the raw job losses. For years, the narrative around Tech in Seattle was about relentless expansion, from cloud computing to e-commerce to AI. Now, coverage speaks of a boom turning to gloom as layoffs ripple through engineering teams and support staff. One report even highlights the number 42 in the context of this downturn, a reminder of how quickly sentiment can flip in a sector that once seemed invincible…