Has the era of the mega-layoff arrived?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Snap is laying off 16% of its staff. Block lopped off 40% of its workforce.

Oracle, meanwhile, is shedding thousands of employees, after Amazon cut about 30,000 in a matter of months.Welcome to the era of the mega-layoff. In Silicon Valley and beyond, companies that are cutting staff are doing it with a big ax.

Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once.That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly.Snap was no different.

Though shares in the social-media company are down 23% over the past year, the company’s stock shot up 8% Wednesday after executives announced that it was eliminating 1,000 jobs.Block shares had fallen 16% this year before it laid off 4,000, or nearly half, of its employees in late February. The stock has since reversed those losses, and then some.Behind the scenes at Block, something else happened, too: Leaders from across the corporate world messaged the payments company’s top executives, asking for the playbook on how they might replicate such sweeping cuts at their own companies, said Amrita Ahuja, Block’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer.“We had people kind of coming out of the woodwork,” Ahuja said in an interview.

Asked if she saw Block’s layoffs of 40% of its workforce as a new template, she said: “It’s an inevitability. As a CFO, I think it’s better to be a little bit