Google decided to lay off 6% of workers

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Alphabet, the parent company of Google, will cut 12,000 jobs, or more than 6%, worldwide. The announcement was made in an email from CEO Sundar Pichai to employees today.

Such a reduction is completely unprecedented for a company with a 25-year history: this year, 200 employees of the bigdata service in the field of health care Verily Life Sciences were fired, and before that, 200 people were laid off during the 2009 crisis, recalls WSJ .

The company's quotes reacted to the news with a 3.5% increase in premarket trading. This is not surprising, given that Google management, after a 27% drop in profits in the third quarter of 2022 (to $ 13.9 billion), promised only a reduction in new hiring, not layoffs. Investors, meanwhile, have long pointed to a bloated staff that has grown 20% a year since 2017, Bloomberg points out.

Google followed the example of other big tech companies – earlier cuts were announced by Meta, Microsoft (10,000), Twitter and Amazon (18,000) recognized as extremist in Russia. So far, the company has held on, but has been forced to lay off due to declining advertising revenue and a cloud division that hasn't taken off, remaining in third place behind Amazon and Microsoft.

According to the WSJ, tech companies laid off nearly 200,000 jobs last year.