My guess, a little bit of everything. Recent performance, cost, location, team/project... In my huge company, we've seen all sort of cases. Very recent employe

My guess, a little bit of everything. Recent performance, cost, location, team/project... In my huge company, we've seen all sort of cases. Very recent employees (which weren't even evaluated yet), "low performers" (but I think it's a misnomer, some "low performers" are productive employees who recently didn't meet some arbitrary expectations). Some entire teams were fired, in some instances they tried to reassign some high performers within these teams. Also managers weren't consulted, and everything was kept secret. Edit: some countries have additional legal constraints too and the process may be more transparent than in the US.