Google cuts 12,000 jobs; layoffs spread in tech sector

Google will lay off 12,000 workers, or about 6% of its workforce, becoming the latest tech company to cut staff as the economic boom the industry experienced during the ebbs of the COVID-19 pandemic slips.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who also runs its parent company Alphabet, briefed the Silicon Valley giant’s staff on Friday about the cuts in an email that was also posted on the company’s news blog.

It’s one of the biggest rounds of layoffs in company history and adds to the tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent company Meta and other tech companies as they adjust. the belt amid an increasingly bleak outlook for the industry. Only this month there have been at least 48,000 layoffs announced by the main companies in the sector.

“Over the past two years we have seen periods of spectacular growth,” Pichai wrote. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than what we face today.”

He said the layoffs reflect a “rigorous review” by Google of its operations.

The jobs being eliminated “span Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions,” Pichai said. He added that he was “deeply sorry” about the layoffs.

The regulatory filings illustrate how Google’s workforce has grown during the pandemic, rising to nearly 187,000 people at the end of last year from 119,000 at the end of 2019.

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

“These are important times to sharpen our focus, reshape our cost base, and direct our talent and capital to our top priorities,” he wrote. He called the company’s investments in artificial intelligence an area of ​​opportunity.

There will be job cuts in the US and in other unspecified countries, according to Pichai’s letter.

The tech industry has been forced to freeze hiring and cut jobs “as the clock strikes midnight on hypergrowth and digital advertising headwinds loom on the horizon,” the analysts wrote Friday. of Wedbush Securities Dan Ives, Taz Koujalgi and John Katsingris.

This week alone, Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts, or nearly 5% of its workforce. Amazon said this month it will cut 18,000 jobs, though that’s a fraction of its robust workforce of 1.5 million, while business software maker Salesforce will lay off about 8,000 employees, or 10% of the total. Last fall, Facebook parent Meta announced it was cutting 11,000 positions, or 13% of its workers. Elon Musk cut jobs at Twitter after he acquired the social media company last fall.

[Con información de The Associated Press]

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