GOOGLE AXES 12,000 JOBS AS LAYOFFS SPREAD ACROSS TECH SECTOR

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 at the Silicon Valley giant about the cuts in an email that was also posted on the company's news blog.

It is the company's biggest-ever 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! He said the layoffs reflect a "rigorous review" carried out by Google of its operations.

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.