Google's parent company, Alphabet, has announced that it's going to be cutting 12,000 jobs globally, which will mean losing around six percent of its entire workforce.
The past few days have seen numerous giants in the tech industry lay off a significant number of staff members, with Microsoft confirming at the start of the week that 10,000 people would lose their jobs and Amazon announcing that 18,000 people would lose their jobs on the same day. It seems that those layoffs were just the start, however, as Google's parent company Alphabet has now confirmed it'll be doing the same.
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As reported by Reuters, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed in an email sent to staff that "approximately" 12,000 people were going to be laid off from the company. These cuts will impact around 6 percent of Alphabet's workforce and will be global, with some employees in the US already receiving emails to confirm their termination.
In the email, which can be seen thanks to Twitter user ulonnaya, Pichai said, "I have some difficult news to share – we’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices. This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I'm deeply sorry for that."
The email continues, "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 noted that the company had seen a growth period over the last two years, but that it was scaling back because it had "hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today".
Alphabet is the latest company in the tech industry to announce sweeping layoffs in a month that's been brutally full of them. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that it'd be cutting 10,000 members of staff across several of its departments, including members of Bethesda and 343 Industries, a move that's been heavily criticised following the company's $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.
In the same week, Amazon announced that it was cutting 18,000 staff members, one of the biggest sets of layoffs in the company's history. Some reportedly woke up to an email simply telling them, "Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated". Infamously, Twitter lost around half of its workforce just a few months back after Elon Musk purchased the company and started gutting it from the inside, a move that has caused him to be sued by some of the affected staff.