Major international IT company sacks all Russian employees in one day

ABBYY, the largest developer of software for processing documents and dictionaries, fired all its employees with Russian citizenship in one day. Mass layoffs of programmers took place in offices in Cyprus, Hungary and Serbia.

"During the meeting, everyone was forbidden to text in the chat and everyone's video and microphones were turned off. They said that everyone was fired, that a letter would be sent to the mail," a former ABBYY employee says.

According to one of the former employees, immediately after the meeting, the company shut down corporate access for the fired Russians.

"They fired everyone who had the Russian passport," the employee said specifying that first the layoffs were announced to the Cyprus office, then to the Serbian one, and then to the Hungarian one.

The largest software developer left Russia in 2022. ABBY's main legal entity in the Russian Federation was abolished only on September 2 of 2024.

Having announced its departure from the Russian Federation, the company offered its Russian employees to relocate. Several hundred IT specialists agreed. All of them were fired on the evening of September 30. Some of the laid-off employees suggested that ABBYY management decided to give preference to Indian developers in order to save money.

At the same time, programmers specified that Russian employees at company headquarters in California were not affected.

ABBY was created by Russian university student

The international software developer was created in 1989 by David Yang, a student at the Russian Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The company was initially called BIT Software, and then was renamed to ABBY in 1997.

In Russia, ABBYY is known primarily for its FineReader utility. This is one of the most powerful and popular text recognition programs. The company currently has 13 offices around the world: in France, Germany, Spain, Great Britain, Australia, Japan, India, Taiwan, and Ukraine.

The company has not yet officially commented on the incident.