Google cuts 12K jobs as tech boom peters out

LONDON — Google is laying off 12,000 workers, or about 6% of its workforce, becoming the latest tech company to trim staff as the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic ebbs.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who also leads its parent company Alphabet, informed staff Friday about the cuts in an email.

It is the Silicon Valley giant’s biggestever round of layoffs and adds to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies as they tighten their belts amid a darkening outlook for the industry. Just this month, there have been at least 48,000 job cuts announced by major companies in the sector.

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

The jobs being eliminated “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions,” Pichai said. He said he was “deeply sorry” for the layoffs.

Regulatory filings illustrate how Google’s workforce swelled during the pandemic, ballooning to nearly 187,000 people by late last year from 119,000 at the end of 2019.

While the tech layoffs are “shocking numbers,” their effect on tech industry employment is “nowhere near as bad as what it seems,” said John Blevins, a business professor at Cornell University.

“These workers who were laid off will readily get new jobs,” most likely at smaller tech companies, Blevins said. “They’re coming with high credentials from these big firms. That knowledge will be transferred and will actually work to everyone’s benefit.”