MOM’s Labour Market Report outlines the latest retrenchment figures and wider employment trends in Singapore

Singapore recorded a notable rise in retrenchments in 2025, with overall job cuts climbing to 14,490 for the year—an increase from 12,930 retrenchments in 2024.

On Mar 20, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) released its latest quarterly Labour Market Report, revealing updated figures on retrenchments and broader employment trends.

The data showed that the incidence of retrenchment rose to 6.3 per 1,000 employees, up from 5.9 per 1,000 the year before.

And within this broader trend, white-collar workers have experienced disproportionate pressure.

PMETs are increasingly on the chopping block

Professional, managerial, executive, and technician (PMET) retrenchments have shown a steeper incline compared to the overall workforce.

In 2025, the incidence of retrenchment for this group rose to 10.1 per 1,000 resident PMETs—above the pre-recessionary average—from 8.6 per 1,000 in 2024.

The layoffs have been largely concentrated in three sectors:

• Financial Services: Banking and insurance firms have cut headcount as market conditions tighten
• Information and Communications: Tech and telecom companies are restructuring in response to changing demands
• Professional Services: Consulting, legal, and accounting firms have undergone notable workforce adjustments

For this specific labour market report, MOM examined trends in PMET roles to assess concerns around AI-driven job disruptions.

While the evidence does not point conclusively to broad-based displacement, there are signs of restructuring that warrant continued monitoring.

Total employment continued to grow

If you’re working in a PMET role, these trends may naturally raise concerns. However, the broader data suggest that this is not necessarily a contraction in demand for these jobs.

The same sectors that saw the highest PMET layoffs also had relatively high PMET job vacancies in Dec 2025, with a combined total of 14,600, up from 13,900 in the year-ago period.

According to MOM, the overlap between higher retrenchments and higher PMET vacancies in these sectors suggests ongoing restructuring and skills transition, where some jobs are being displaced as firms restructure, while hiring continues for others.

For the full year of 2025, total employment grew by 55,500, up from 44,500 in 2024. Of this, resident employment grew by 11,600, driven largely by financial services as well as health and social services.

In 2026, resident employment is expected to grow at a similar or slightly slower pace, said MOM.

• Read more articles we’ve written on Singapore’s job trends here.

Featured Image Credit: Shadow_of_light/ depositphotos

A critical vulnerability in the wolfSSL SSL/TLS library can weaken security via improper verification of the hash algorithm or its size when checking Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) signatures.

Researchers warn that an attacker could exploit the issue to force a target device or application to accept forged certificates for malicious servers or connections.

wolfSSL is a lightweight TLS/SSL implementation written in C, designed for embedded systems, IoT devices, industrial control systems, routers, appliances, sensors, automotive systems, and even aerospace or military equipment.

According to the project’s website, wolfSSL is used in more than 5 billion applications and devices worldwide.

The vulnerability, discovered by Nicholas Carlini of Anthropic and tracked as CVE-2026-5194, is a cryptographic validation flaw that affects multiple signature algorithms in wolfSSL, allowing improperly weak digests to be accepted during certificate verification.

The issue impacts multiple algorithms, including ECDSA/ECC, DSA, ML-DSA, Ed25519, and Ed448. For builds that have both ECC and EdDSA or ML-DSA active, it is recommended to upgrade to the latest wolfSSL release.

CVE-2026-5194 was addressed in wolfSSL version 5.9.1, released on April 8.

“Missing hash/digest size and OID checks allow digests smaller than allowed when verifying ECDSA certificates, or smaller than is appropriate for the relevant key type, to be accepted by signature verification functions,” reads the security advisory.

“This could lead to reduced security of ECDSA certificate-based authentication if the public CA [certificate authority] key used is also known.”

According to Lukasz Olejnik, independent security researcher and consultant, exploiting CVE-2026-5194 could trick applications or devices using a vulnerable wolfSSL version to “accept a forged digital identity as genuine, trusting a malicious server, file, or connection it should have rejected.”

An attacker can exploit this weakness by supplying a forged certificate with a smaller digest than cryptographically appropriate, so the system accepts a signature that is easier to falsify or reproduce.

While the vulnerability impacts the core signature verification routine, there may be prerequisites and deployment-specific conditions that might limit exploitation.

System administrators managing environments that do not use upstream wolfSSL releases but instead rely on Linux distribution packages, vendor firmware, and embedded SDKs should seek downstream vendor advisories for better clarity.

For example, Red Hat’s advisory, which assigns the flaw a maximum severity rating, states that MariaDB is not affected because it uses OpenSSL rather than wolfSSL for cryptographic operations.

Organizations using wolfSSL are advised to review their deployments and apply the security updates promptly to ensure certificate validation remains secure.

Automated pentesting proves the path exists. BAS proves whether your controls stop it. Most teams run one without the other.

This whitepaper maps six validation surfaces, shows where coverage ends, and provides practitioners with three diagnostic questions for any tool evaluation.

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Microsoft is shutting down Outlook Lite on May 26, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday. Launched in 2022, Outlook Lite is a lightweight version of the regular Outlook app, designed for Android phones with limited storage and regions with slower internet connections. 

The app had already been scheduled for retirement — Microsoft announced last year that the app would be removed from the Google Play Store in October 2025. Now the company has confirmed that the app will lose functionality for existing users next month.

The news was first reported by Neowin.

“To continue enjoying a secure and feature-rich email experience, we recommend switching to Outlook Mobile,” Microsoft says in an Outlook Lite support page.

Outlook Lite users will be able to access their existing email, calendar items, and attachments by signing into Outlook Mobile. Users will also be directed to the Google Play Store to download the standard Outlook app.

The photorealistic digital character is trained on Zuckerberg’s mannerisms, tone, and his own thinking on company strategy. He is personally involved in testing it. The effort, described by four people familiar with the matter, is separate from a ‘CEO agent’ that handles tasks for Zuckerberg directly.

Meta is building a photorealistic, AI-powered version of Mark Zuckerberg that can interact with employees in his place, the Financial Times reported on Monday, citing four people familiar with the matter.

The character is being developed by Meta’s Superintelligence Labs and is trained on Zuckerberg’s mannerisms, tone, and publicly available statements, as well as his own thinking on company strategy, so that employees, in the words of one person familiar with the project, ‘might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.’ Z

uckerberg is personally involved in training and testing the animated version of himself.

The effort is at an early stage and is separate from a different project, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, in which Meta is building a ‘CEO agent’ designed to help Zuckerberg himself retrieve information faster, a tool that assists him rather than stands in for him.

The AI character project is part of a broader push within Meta’s Superintelligence Labs to develop lifelike, AI-driven digital figures capable of real-time conversation. The technical challenge is substantial: achieving realism and preventing perceptible delays in conversation requires enormous computing power.

The project reflects a significant escalation of Zuckerberg’s own involvement in Meta’s AI work. According to people familiar with the matter, he has been spending five to ten hours a week writing code on various AI projects and attending technical engineering review sessions, an unusual level of hands-on engagement for a CEO running a $1.6 trillion company.

He has committed publicly to developing what he calls ‘personal superintelligence’ as Meta works to close the gap with OpenAI and Google. On a January earnings call, he said Meta was ‘elevating individual contributors and flattening teams’ through AI-native tooling.

Meta has a history with AI characters. In September 2023 it launched a range of celebrity-based chatbots, among them personas modelled on Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner, and Naomi Osaka, all of whom licensed their likenesses, but these were discontinued in the summer of 2024 after failing to gain meaningful traction.

Meta then opened an AI Studio allowing users and creators to build their own AI characters, but ran into controversy when users began generating sexually explicit personas. Since January, Meta has restricted teenager access to AI characters. Zuckerberg’s interest in the format was reportedly sharpened by the success of AI companion startup Character.AI, particularly with younger users.

Meta is not the only company exploring AI versions of its leadership. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during a podcast interview earlier this year that his employees had built an AI clone of him.

But the Zuckerberg project has a different scale and institutional purpose: it is being designed as a mechanism for a $1.6 trillion company’s 79,000 employees to feel a sense of connection to a founder who is, by any measure, difficult to reach.

A multifaceted decahedral black ceramic bezel and sandwich-style three-piece case—a reworking of Bremont’s signature Trip-Tick construction—house a chronometer-rated automatic chronograph movement made by Sellita, with a 62-hour power reserve.

The watch will be a passenger aboard the FLIP rover, due to launch as part of Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1), expected to land at the lunar south pole at some point in the second half of this year.

It’s a one-way mission: The rover will remain permanently on the lunar surface, with the watch ticking away as it roams the landscape. FLIP’s objectives include reaching elevated positions on the lunar terrain, gathering data on lunar dust accumulation, testing dust-mitigation coatings, and surviving a two-week lunar night in hibernation (which would be a first for a US rover).

In terms of serious timekeeping data for Bremont, the mission is frankly symbolic. The watch will be positioned vertically in a specially designed housing within the FLIP’s chassis, between its front wheels. Only the watch head, weighing 107 grams, is included, glued in place using a specialist composite, its face visible to FLIP’s HD cameras. But the hibernatory periods will mean the watch (whose mechanical movement is driven in normal circumstances by the motion of the wearer’s arm) will stop running once its 62-hour power reserve runs down.

When the FLIP is on the move again, its motion should—in theory—jolt the mechanism into action once more. Despite the gravitational pull that’s a sixth of the Earth’s, the acceleration, pitches, and tilts of the rover should swing the winding rotor, if with less torque and efficiency than on Earth.

“My guess is that the watch will function from time to time, but for short periods,” Cerrato says. “We will learn along the way. But that’s what is exciting—it projects us into a thinking process that is absolutely out of the box. Just the fact of having it there is inspiring.” However, there is little doubt that Bremont will, just like other brands with any ties to the cosmos, mine its new space connection for all it is worth.

FLIP itself, which weighs just 1,058 pounds and carries a mix of commercial and government payloads, four HD cameras, and a deployable solar array, is fundamentally a technology demonstrator for Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX), Astrolab’s much larger SUV-sized rover destined to support NASA’s Artemis program. The firm developed the FLIP from scratch after NASA’s equivalent vehicle for which the Griffin-1 mission was contracted, the VIPER, was put on pause in 2024. This left Astrobotic seeking a stand-in in short order. Astrolab, which signed the contract within a month of hearing about the opportunity in the fall of 2024, took the FLIP from blank sheet to finished rover in roughly a year.

Its standout feature is its hyper-deformable wheels, minutely structured from silicone, composite, and stainless steel, which create a soft, enlarged contact surface with the terrain. “It’s like if you’re off-roading in a Jeep or Land Rover where you let some air out of the tires to go softer and spread the load over a larger area,” explains Astrolab’s founder, Jaret Matthews. While the moon’s nighttime temperatures of around -200 degrees Celsius (around -328 Fahrenheit) would cause conventional rubber tires to become glass-like and shatter, Astrolab’s solution is intended to keep the rover from sinking into the unconsolidated lunar dust—or regolith—that covers the environment.

The case is white zirconium oxide ceramic with a Ceratanium bezel and back, rated to handle temperature swings from 100 to -100 degrees Celsius (212 to -238 Fahrenheit). Indeed, the whole piece has been shaken to 10 g’s at Vast’s Long Beach facility, exceeding forces astronauts experience during ascent, and came out the other side running just fine. Price is still up in the air.

TAG Heuer Monaco Evergraph (From $25,000)

Watch brands love finding ever more recherché areas to reinvent, and the precise “snick” of a chronograph’s stop/start/reset buttons is the latest micro-battlefield in which R&D teams are duking it out. Last year, Audemars Piguet took the feel of an iPhone button as the inspiration for its Royal Oak RD#5; now TAG Heuer has its own take on push-button ergonomics.

Normally, chronograph buttons involve a cluster of levers, springs, and cams that click into place with varying degrees of precision. TAG Heuer has thrown most of that out with the Calibre TH80-00, five years in development between its TAG Heuer LAB innovation department and movement maker Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier. It replaces the traditional architecture with two flexible bistable components—essentially shape-shifting parts that snap between positions—produced via high-precision LIGA fabrication, a micro-manufacturing technique that includes lithography, electroforming, and molding.

The result? Crisper actuation that, crucially, doesn’t degrade. According to TAG, the 10,000th press feels identical to the first. Paired with TAG’s incredibly high-tech TH-Carbonspring oscillator (magnetism-resistant, 5-Hz, 70-hour reserve, COSC-certified), it’s housed in a reworked 40-mm titanium Monaco with the crown back on the left where Steve McQueen’s 1969 original had it. You get two versions: brushed titanium with blue accents or black Diamond-Like Carbon (DLC) with red. The dial is transparent acrylic, so you can watch the compliant mechanism do its thing.

Vacheron Constantin Overseas Dual Time Cardinal Points (Price on Request)

Vacheron Constantin’s Overseas line, among the most celebrated examples of Switzerland’s dominant “sports-luxe” genre, leans heavily into the sports side with a full-titanium, GMT-treatment across four references. Each dial is color-mapped to a compass point: white for north, brown for south, green for west, blue for east, contrasting with a bright orange, Rolex-style GMT hand for the time zone at home.

The lineage traces to a 2019 prototype built for explorer Cory Richards to wear up Everest—probably the most luxurious timepiece that has been to such places. The 41-mm case, integrated bracelet, and folding clasp are all in titanium with a matte anthracite finish on the bezel and crown. Inside is the in-house Calibre 5110 DT/3, a self-winding GMT with home-time am/pm indicator, local-time date pusher, and 60-hour reserve. Classic sports watch attributes, but here certified with the Geneva Hallmark, the highest official benchmark of fine watchmaking and hand-finishing.