What’s really weird to me is they clearly wanted to convey to the Street that these layoffs were _not_ motivated by any of their financial results with the phrasing “fewer than 4,000”. But they conspicuously didn’t provide any other reason. No divisions closing down, no realignment of capital.

I wonder if someone in the C-suite simply decided that they had some rough percentage of underperformers on the payroll, but they can’t publicly call them performance based terminations without triggering a risk of lawsuits.

It's 100% normal these days. My employer did the same thing in January.