Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in an internal memo that the company will be laying off additional employees in 2024. The layoffs will not be as significant as those that took place in 2023, and will not affect all teams within the Alphabet subsidiary.
In early 2023, Google announced plans to lay off around 12,000 employees worldwide, or just over 6% of its total workforce. The layoffs were designed to adjust the company’s workforce after two years of rapid growth in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Pichai said that the company is still planning to make significant investments in 2024, particularly in artificial intelligence. “To make the resources available to make these investments, we need to make some tough decisions,” he wrote.
He added that “many of these changes have already been announced internally” with the affected teams, and that there could be additional adjustments made throughout the year.
As of the end of September 2023, Alphabet employed around 182,000 people, down by about 7,800 from the end of 2022, according to documents published by the company.
According to several media reports, Google laid off around 1,000 employees last week. The company also revealed to The Verge on Tuesday that it is eliminating hundreds of additional jobs, particularly in the division that sells advertising space to large businesses.
On Wednesday, around 100 employees at YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, were informed that they would be laid off soon, according to several American media outlets.
Most major technology companies, with the exception of Apple, have made workforce reductions since 2022. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, for example, has laid off more than 20,000 employees, while Amazon has eliminated 27,000 jobs.
