Uber is cutting approximately 3,300 jobs, about 10% of its global workforce, as part of a restructuring that CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced to staff on Wednesday, as reported by Financial Times. The company framed the reductions as a management simplification rather than a cost-cutting response to financial distress, though the timing sits alongside a share price that has fallen nearly 9% so far this year.
Khosrowshahi told employees in an internal message that "the changes we're making today are designed to do two things: make Uber simpler and faster, and create more capacity to invest in our future." He acknowledged that years of growth had produced structural problems, writing that the expansion had led to "complexity: more layers, more co-ordination, more fragmented ownership, and in some cases structures that made sense when businesses were smaller but no longer serve us well at our current scale."
Uber's stock rose 2% in pre-market trading after the announcement, according to Google Finance data.
Where Uber's competitive position actually stands
The restructuring arrives as Uber contends with two separate competitive pressures pulling in different directions. In autonomous vehicles, the company has pledged more than $10 billion to expand its robotaxi network and plans to operate services in at least 15 cities this year. Alphabet's Waymo and Elon Musk's Tesla represent its primary competition for that market. Uber's UK partner Wayve received permits from Transport for London last month to launch a commercial robotaxi service, though the initial phase requires a supervising driver in the vehicle.
In food delivery, the picture is more immediate and more difficult. DoorDash holds approximately 64% of the US market, its highest share since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. Uber Eats sits at 31% in the US. The contrast with Uber Eats' performance in Europe is sharp. The service has gained market share in the UK, France, and Germany while losing ground domestically to a competitor that has spent years reinforcing its US logistics infrastructure.
The Delivery Hero acquisition and what it adds to an already complex integration
In July, Uber agreed to acquire Berlin-based food delivery group Delivery Hero in a deal valued at €13 billion. The company is now preparing to integrate that business while simultaneously reducing its workforce and building out autonomous vehicle infrastructure.
Delivery Hero operates across more than 70 countries and runs the Talabat platform across the Middle East, which was separately listed on the Dubai Financial Market in December 2024 in one of the region's largest IPOs. Acquiring Delivery Hero gives Uber a significant footprint in markets where it had limited or no food delivery presence, particularly in the Middle East and parts of Asia. The integration challenge is substantial. Delivery Hero had been restructuring its own operations for much of 2024 and 2025, including selling its Foodpanda business in several Asian markets to Grab. Uber is absorbing a company that was itself in the middle of a strategic contraction, which adds complexity to an integration that is already logistically demanding given the geographic scope.
Uber's previous major layoffs for context
The 3,300 job cuts announced Wednesday are not Uber's first significant workforce reduction. In May 2020, during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Uber cut approximately 3,700 employees, about 14% of its workforce at the time, as ride volumes collapsed globally. A second round followed weeks later when the company cut roughly 3,000 more positions and shut down several business units including its AI labs and the Uber Works staffing service. The 2026 cuts differ from the pandemic reductions in their stated rationale. The 2020 cuts were an emergency response to revenue collapse. Wednesday's announcement describes a deliberate structural simplification ahead of major capital deployment into autonomous vehicles and the Delivery Hero integration.
The autonomous vehicle bet carries its own execution risk. Uber's $10 billion commitment to robotaxi expansion assumes the company's 200 million customer base and existing driver network give it a distribution advantage over pure-play robotaxi operators. Waymo, however, has already established paid commercial service in multiple US cities and operates without a pre-autonomous driver network to manage alongside the new technology.
Whether the management layer reduction creates the speed Khosrowshahi described or simply concentrates operational risk during a period of unusually large strategic bets remains to be seen.
Tanya Petrusenko
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