Digital payments company PayPal on Tuesday announced it was laying off 2,000 people, seven per cent of its global workforce, to cut costs.

The company said in a statement that its chairman, Dan Schulman, had told workers today that the layoffs would take place in the coming weeks, without specifying in which units.

PayPal is the latest technology company to announce massive layoffs in the US, after big names like Microsoft and Amazon, which have already involved tens of thousands of workers.

In its text, PayPal mentioned the difficulties of the “macroeconomic context” and admitted that its efforts to reduce costs were not enough, so it had to make “difficult decisions”.

When the news broke at the end of the session on Wall Street, the company’s shares rose two per cent, a reflection of the welcome of the redundancies by investors.

Last year, PayPal lost 54 per cent of its capitalisation.