For just the third time since 2008, US firms announced more than 70,000 job cuts during the month of November.

That’s the bad news from Thursday’s closely-watched Challenger, Gray & Christmas release. (Leave it to me to start with the bad news. Old habits. And perennial despondency. Expect the worst and you’ll never be disappointed.)

To be fair (to me), there wasn’t a lot of good news in the release. The 71,321 headline at least marked a deceleration from October, but as the figure below not-so-gently reminds you, that’s not saying a lot: October’s figure was outright harrowing.

If you’re wondering how this November stacks up to most Novembers, the answer’s “poorly.” Just twice previously have US job cut announcements topped 70,000 in November since 2008: 2022 and 2008 itself.

As the editorial which accompanied the figures pointed out, this marks the eighth time in 2025 that announced job cuts were higher versus the same month a year ago. The YoY gain for November was nearly 24%.

For 2025 as a whole, Challenger now counts 1.171 million cuts. That’s up more than 50% from first 11 months of 2024.

There’s the chart. 2025’s in bad company. The only time job cuts were higher through November was during years of crisis or, more accurately, the aftermath of crises.

If you’re keeping score at home (you know, during the free time you have after being laid off and replaced by an LLM), this year marks just the sixth time since the early 1990s when through-November job cuts exceeded 1.1 million.

The two industries cutting the most jobs in November were telecom and tech. The most-cited reasons for cuts were restructuring and, of course, AI which is now responsible for nearly 55,000 job cut announcements in 2025.

[Insert Trump “You’re fired” meme]