It always surprises me when layoffs are this large. I would have thought the business would slowly scale down to keep up with business cessation. Guess it would be more awkward to fire people one by one for redundancy purposes.
In Finland it isn't that easy to fire people one by one from permanent positions when it's not related to employee's performance. Company can offer good exit packages to ask people to leave (x months of salary), I believe this is what Nokia did at some point. In general it's normal to do big layoff rounds that involve proper announcements and negotiations between company and employee-representatives.
As someone who went through a process of constant threat of redundancy over many years - it is far better for employee morale to just do a bulk redundancy process, rather than dribs and drabs. Living with the prospect of every day not knowing if this was the day you lose your job, when so many friends had already lost theirs, is highly stressful and demoralizing.
If you give people the idea that more firings are coming, you'll also see many of your best performers leave first, because they have the easiest way out.
I dunno, I would hate to work for a company where one of my coworkers disappeared every two weeks, and you never know if you'll be next. At least this way after the big layoff those who are still around don't have to be looking over their shoulder quite so frequently wondering if they're the next one to go.
At least here in Finland it is much, much easier from a regulations perspective for a company to fire a bunch of people all at once rather than just few at a time.