Alphabet, which owns Google, will let go of 12,000 employees. This is the latest round of layoffs in the tech industry.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in an internal email that he was “fully responsible” for the layoffs.
The cuts will affect 6% of Alphabet’s employees worldwide, including people in teams like engineering and recruitment.
This comes after Microsoft said 10,000 jobs would be cut, and Amazon said 18,000 jobs would be lost.
Mr. Pichai thanked his staff for “working so hard” at their jobs and said their “contributions have been invaluable.”
He wrote, “This change won’t be easy, but we’ll help employees find their next job.”
Take care of yourselves until then as you try to process this bad news. “As part of it, please feel free to work from home today if you are just starting your work day.”
A recent report to Companies House shows that Google has more than 5,500 employees in the UK. But it’s unclear how many of these jobs will be lost because of the cuts.
‘Unsustainable’
Mr. Pichai said that US employees being let go would get at least 16 weeks of pay, their bonus for 2022, paid vacations, and health insurance for six months.
He said that even on the worst days, he was still “optimistic about our ability to carry out our mission.”
Wall Street liked the cuts. Before the stock market opened, Alphabet shares increased by 3.5% in online trading.
Analysts have said that the big names in tech have spent too much in the past and don’t see a slowdown on the horizon.
Daniel Ives of Wedbush Securities said that the layoffs show how wasteful spending is in a sector experiencing “hypergrowth.”
“The truth is that tech giants were hired at a rate that couldn’t be kept up,” he said. “Now, a darker macro is forcing layoffs across the tech industry.”
The tech site Layoffs.fyi says that since the beginning of 2022, nearly 194,000 tech workers in the US have lost their jobs. This number does not include the layoffs announced by Alphabet on Friday.
This month, Hewlett-Packard and Salesforce, a big cloud computing company, announced big cuts. This is because high inflation and rising interest rates have slowed growth.
Also keeping an eye on US IT behemoths is the European Union. It has started putting restrictions on companies to stop them from avoiding taxes, limiting competition, making money off of news content without paying for it, and being places where hate speech and false information can be spread.
