LONDON: As the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end, Google is laying off 12,000 employees. On Friday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent out an email to staff, which was also posted on Google's blog.
The layoffs join tens of thousands of other job cuts announced recently by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta, and other tech companies as they tighten their belts in the face of a bleak industry outlook. Just this month, major companies in the sector announced at least 48,000 job cuts.
“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” Pichai wrote. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
He said the layoffs reflect a “rigorous review” carried out by Google of its operations.
The jobs being eliminated “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions,” Pichai said.
The company stated in a regulatory filing late last year that it employed nearly 187,000 people. Google, which was founded nearly a quarter-century ago, is "bound to go through difficult economic cycles," according to Pichai.
"These are critical times for us to sharpen our focus, re-engineer our cost structure, and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities," he wrote. According to Pichai's letter, there will be job cuts in the United States and other countries.
Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts earlier this week, accounting for nearly 5% of its workforce. Amazon has announced the elimination of 18,000 jobs, a fraction of its 1.5 million-person workforce. Facebook parent Meta is laying off 11,000 employees, or 13% of its total workforce, while business software maker Salesforce is laying off 8,000 employees, or 10% of its total workforce. Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, has cut jobs since acquiring the company last fall.
The U.S. job market has been resilient despite signs of a slowdown, and another 223,000 jobs were added in December. However, the technology sector has grown extremely quickly in recent years due to increased demand as employees began to work remotely.
CEOs of a number of companies have been blamed for expanding too quickly, yet those same companies, even after the latest round of job cuts, are still much larger than they were before the pandemic's economic boom began.