Google laid off hundreds of employees across multiple divisions—including its hardware and engineering divisions—on Wednesday night, joining other tech companies like Amazon and Unity in announcing sizeable job cuts at the start of the year.
File Photo: Google laid of a few hundred staffers each from three divisions on Wednesday.
The layoffs were first reported by the New York Times and Semafor late on Wednesday and have since been confirmed by Google itself.
The job cuts included employees from Google’s core engineering division, the hardware division that makes Pixel and Fitbit devices and the team working on Google Assistant.
According to the New York Times, “several hundred” workers from the core engineering team were sent notices about being laid off and lost access to corporate systems on Wednesday night.
The devices and services team that designs Google’s smartphones, smartwatches, and fitness trackers also saw “restructuring” on Monday, leading to hundreds of roles being eliminated, 9to5Google reported.
Hundreds were also laid off from the Google Assistant—the company’s competitor to Apple’s Siri and Amazon Alexa—as part of a restructuring that plans to integrate newer artificial intelligence technology into the service, the company told Semafor.
The company confirmed with the Verge that a few hundred people were laid off from each of the three divisions.
In an emailed statement, a Google spokesperson told Forbes that the layoffs were part of organizational changes the company was making “to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities.” The statement added that the company will “support any impacted employees as they look for new roles here at Google and beyond.”
12,000. The approximate number of employees Google laid off at the start of 2023—around six percent of the company’s total workforce at the time. Last year’s layoffs came amid fears of a global economic downturn after a major hiring boom during the Covid-19 pandemic. In an internal meeting in December, the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai admitted that the layoffs could have been handled better and said: “At Google, we really haven't had a moment quite like that in 25 years.”