Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami told employees on Wednesday the company is cutting roughly 20% of its workforce, eliminating about 1,000 positions in the largest layoff in the company’s history. The Israel-based company operates a platform that lets people and businesses build websites without writing code. He posted the announcement on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn simultaneously. Sharing here the message I just sent to the whole Wix team: Today is a sad day for me. We have made a very hard decision. We are reducing the Wix team size by roughly 20%. It is one of the hardest decisions I have had to make, but I am confident it is the right one, and I will… — Avishai Abrahami (@Avishai_ab) May 28, 2026 In the social media post, Abrahami named two forces. The first is currency. Wix earns revenue in dollars but pays more than 60% of its workforce in Israeli shekels. The shekel appreciated roughly 14% against the dollar over 2025 and gained another 7% through the first five months of 2026. He said, “This creates a structural pressure on our ability to operate at our current scale.” The second is AI. “We have witnessed the most significant shift in how companies are built since the invention of modern programming languages in the 1970s,” Abrahami wrote. A 27% stock crash on earnings day set this in motion On May 13, Wix shares dropped 27% after Q1 earnings missed Wall Street expectations. Revenue rose 14% year on year to $541 million, but the company swung to a $57.5 million net loss after several profitable quarters. Adjusted earnings landed at $0.68 per share against a $1.22 consensus. OpEx as a percentage of revenue jumped from 21% in Q1 2025 to 35% in Q1 2026. Shares have lost more than half their value since January, cutting Wix’s market cap to roughly $2 billion. At its 2021 peak, the company was worth nearly $20 billion. The company also acknowledged that professional developer customers were leaving for competing AI tools and that its new Wix Harmony platform had gaps that slowed product updates. Wix CEO is now creating AI-native roles Abrahami said Wix will strip out management layers, cutting levels between senior leadership and the most junior staff. The company has created new positions designed around AI workflows, including a role called “xEngineer,” described as a design-first engineering position for employees who work primarily with AI tools. A second new role called “Creators” is also part of the shift. Once the cuts are complete, headcount will settle around 4,200. Affected workers will receive individually tailored severance packages. Vibe-coding startups are pulling users away from Wix Wix’s core product, a platform letting non-technical users build websites, faces a growing challenge from AI-native tools that generate sites from plain-language descriptions. Lovable, now valued at $1.8 billion, and Bolt.new have drawn users who might previously have chosen Wix. Wix bought vibe-coding platform Base44 for $80 million earlier this year, specifically to compete. Base44 reportedly hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue within about a year of its founding. The acquisition has not reversed the competitive pressure. AI label keeps showing up as tech job cuts reach 134,000 and counting Wix joins a list that grows weekly. Block cut nearly 4,000 jobs in February, with CEO Jack Dorsey citing AI tools enabling “smaller, highly talented teams.” Cisco cut 5% of its workforce this month. Meta eliminated around 8,000 positions last week. Oracle cut up to 30,000 roles. Microsoft introduced its first voluntary retirement program. Over 134,000 tech positions have been cut through 212 layoffs in 2026 thus far. As Cryptopolitan reported in April, a Duke University and Federal Reserve survey of 750+ CFOs found over 80% reported zero productivity gains from AI, even as the same survey projected 502,000 AI-related job cuts for the full year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged there is some “AI washing” happening, where companies blame AI for layoffs they would have made regardless. If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter .
