Uber announced on September 2, 2026, that it will lay off approximately 3,300 employees, about 10% of its global workforce, marking the company’s largest reduction in headcount since the COVID-19 pandemic, when it eliminated roughly 6,700 jobs in May 2020. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi detailed the restructuring in an internal email, first reported by Bloomberg, describing a company that had accumulated “more layers, more coordination, more fragmented ownership” as it scaled — structures he said “made sense when businesses were smaller but no longer serve us well at our current scale.”
The restructuring goes beyond a simple headcount reduction. Uber plans to cut its number of managers by 20%, with some moving into individual contributor roles, while shrinking teams of one or two people by half. Staff members more than seven layers removed from the CEO are also affected, according to Bloomberg’s reporting. The company is combining its engineering, science, and delivery divisions, and consolidating delivery operations across its restaurant, retail, and direct-delivery businesses. Uber also ceased operations entirely in Nigeria and Uganda as part of the changes.
Why Now, Despite Strong Growth
The layoffs land at an unusual moment for a company that isn’t struggling by conventional financial measures. Uber’s revenue grew 18% between 2024 and 2025 to $52 billion, and second-quarter 2026 revenue rose 12% year-over-year to $14.2 billion, even as that growth rate moderated somewhat. Uber joined the S&P 100 in September 2025, and the company has posted five consecutive years of 20%-plus annual gross bookings growth. Despite that performance, Uber’s stock has struggled in 2026, down roughly 8% for the year and trailing both the S&P 500 and rival Lyft.
Khosrowshahi did not attribute the cuts directly to artificial intelligence, though the company is absorbing rising AI-related costs internally — according to Reuters, Uber employees used up the company’s entire 2026 AI budget within the first four months of the year.
Betting Big on a Driverless Future
The restructuring frees up spending for what Khosrowshahi has described as making Uber the “world’s leading commercialization platform for autonomous vehicles.” The company has committed more than $10 billion to autonomous vehicle investment in the coming years, backing multiple self-driving developers, including Rivian, Baidu, and Pony.ai, rather than building its own robotaxi technology in-house — a lesson learned after Uber sold its original self-driving research unit, Advanced Technologies Group, back in 2020 after recognizing it couldn’t fund the effort independently.
Under the current strategy, Uber positions itself as the marketplace where autonomous rides get booked and managed, rather than the company building the vehicles themselves. Waymo vehicles already operate through the Uber app in Austin and Atlanta, with Uber handling charging, cleaning, and inspection logistics for those fleets in both markets. Partners have committed roughly 120,000 vehicles to Uber’s platform as the company scales this approach.
Not Everyone Sees Uber as the Long-Term Winner
The strategy carries real risk for Uber’s traditional business model. Waymo has continued expanding into cities where it operates independently of Uber’s app, and Tesla and other autonomous vehicle developers are building competing robotaxi networks that could eventually connect riders directly, bypassing ride-hailing intermediaries altogether. If autonomous vehicles capture a larger share of the ride-hailing market over the coming years, Uber’s core role as the matchmaker between passengers and drivers faces genuine pressure — a dynamic that helps explain why the company is moving aggressively now to lock in exclusive or preferential partnerships with AV developers while it still has leverage to do so.
What This Means for Riders and Drivers
For everyday Uber riders, this restructuring is unlikely to change the app experience in the near term — the affected roles are concentrated in management, engineering, and internal operations rather than customer-facing functions. The more significant long-term shift to watch is how quickly autonomous vehicles expand within the Uber app in cities beyond Austin and Atlanta, since that expansion is precisely what this reorganization is designed to fund. For Uber drivers, the broader autonomous vehicle push represents a genuine long-term question mark about the platform’s reliance on human drivers, even though Uber’s public position remains that AVs and human drivers will coexist on the platform rather than one fully replacing the other in the near term.
