Silicon Valley giant Google to lay off 12,000 employees

Google is laying off 12,000 employees, or about 6% of its workforce, becoming the latest tech company to lay off staff as the industry’s booming economy during the COVID-19 pandemic subsided.

On Friday, CEO Sundar Pichai briefed the Silicon Valley giant’s employees on the cuts in an email that was also posted on the company’s news blog.

The layoffs add to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies as they tighten their belts amid a bleak outlook for the industry. This month alone, major companies in the sector have announced at least 48,000 job cuts.

“Over the past two years, we have witnessed periods of dramatic growth,” Pichai wrote. “To match and fuel this growth, we hired employees for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”

He said the layoffs reflected Google’s “thorough scrutiny” of its operations.

According to Pichai, the jobs being eliminated “spread across Alphabet, product areas, features, tiers and regions.”

In a regulatory report late last year, the company said it employs about 187,000 people.

Pichai said that Google, which was founded almost a quarter of a century ago, “has to go through difficult economic cycles.”

“These are important moments to sharpen our focus, rebuild our cost base and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities,” he wrote.

Jobs will be cut in the US and other countries, according to Pchai’s letter.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced it was cutting 10,000 jobs, or nearly 5% of its workforce. Amazon has announced 18,000 job cuts, though that’s only a fraction of its 1.5 million employees. Facebook parent company Meta is cutting 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce, while business software maker Salesforce is laying off about 8,000 employees, or 10% of the total. Twitter CEO Elon Musk laid off employees of the company after he acquired it last fall.

US employment has been resilient despite signs of a slowdown in the economy, with another 223,000 jobs added in December. However, the tech sector has grown exceptionally fast over the past few years due to increased demand as employees began working remotely.

A number of company executives have taken the blame for growing too fast, but these same companies, even after the latest round of job cuts, remain much larger than they were before the pandemic boomed.