There are numerous reasons the tech industry wound up at this layoffpalooza, but I think the main reason is that the biggest companies got caught up in a game where they tried to hire everyone, whether they needed them or not, to keep talent away from competitors and keep talent away from small upstarts (or from founding their own small upstarts). These big companies were just hiring to hire, and now the jig is up.
There’s only one big tech company that seemingly never played this hire-for-the-sake-of-hiring game, and thus hasn’t announced any layoffs at all, let alone a headcount that would fill a basketball arena. Just one. One company that has, at its best, always kept its cool in the face of economic swings both up and down.