Google’s parent company Alphabet on Saturday announced that it has concluded plans to cut no fewer than 12,000 jobs globally, citing a changing economic reality as it became the latest US tech giant to enact large-scale restructuring.
The announcement of the layoffs comes a day after Microsoft announced that it will be reducing its workforce by 10,000 over the next few months. Meta, the owner of Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter have all made similar cuts as the tech industry braces for a slump.
The layoffs come after a significant hiring frenzy at the height of the coronavirus outbreak, when businesses scurried to keep up with demand as more people turned to the internet for work, school, and pleasure.
‘Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,’ Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in an email to employees.
‘To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.’
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A review is taking place to make sure that people and their roles are in line with the company’s priorities, Pichai said, adding that the workforce would be reduced by around 12,000 positions.
Alphabet employed nearly 187,000 workers worldwide at the end of September 2022. The cuts represent a little over 6 percent of its total workforce.
The cuts will be ‘across departments, functions, levels of responsibility and regions,’ Pichai added.
‘The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.’
Pichai said that the cuts would ‘sharpen our focus’ on priorities including artificial intelligence.
‘Being constrained in some areas allows us to bet big on others,’ he said.
Africa Today News, New York reports that Google’s world-dominating search engine has recently seen itself under pressure with the emergence of ChatGPT, a Microsoft-backed chatbot that can generate elaborate, human-like content in just seconds.