Google: Parent firm Alphabet announces 12,000 sackings worldwide as CEO Sundar Pichai takes ‘full responsibility’
Google’s parent company Alphabet has become the latest Silicon Valley powerhouse to announce a raft of redundancies across its global workforce.
The tech giant said today that it would cut six per cent of its global workforce, around 12,000 people worldwide.
“I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here,” chief executive Sundar Pichai told employees earlier today.
The layoffs have impacted Alphabet’s US staff first, as the memo said the group had already contacted those affected.
Elsewhere, the process will be slightly longer due to local laws and practices.
Pichai told employees that Alphabet was forced to review its products and priorities as it is now facing a much starker economic reality than it envisioned two years ago.
“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” the chief executive wrote.
“To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Commenting on the news, Chris Cook – employment and data protection partner at law firm SA Law – told Morning Wire it might be harder for Alphabet to sack people outside of the US.
“While employment laws in the US are relatively employer-friendly, the same cannot be said for the UK and the EU, where collective consultation and unfair dismissal legislation is in place to protect individuals from redundancies made in the absence of proper consultation,” he said.
Alphabet’s announcement comes days after Microsoft confirmed reports and announced on Wednesday it was sacking 10,000 across its global workforce.
The PC powerhouse said the cuts were necessary to balance the company’s short and long-term goals amid fears of a global recession.
According to layoff tracker layoffs.fyi, almost 39,000 people have been laid off by tech companies worldwide since the start of 2023.
Until Alphabet’s announcement, Microsoft and Salesforce had done the most sacking, letting go of 10,000 and 8,000 people respectively.