Google lays off hundreds of people due to cost-cutting

Google has laid off hundreds of employees working in hardware, voice assistance and engineering teams as part of cost-cutting measures.

The cuts come as Google plans to “responsibly invest in our company's biggest priorities and the important opportunities ahead,” the company said in a statement.

“Some teams continue to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some elimination of roles globally,” it said.

Google earlier said it was eliminating a few hundred roles, with the biggest impact on its augmented reality hardware team.

The cuts follow pledges by executives at Google and parent company Alphabet to cut costs. A year ago, Google said it would lay off 12,000 employees, or about 6% of its workforce.

In a post on X – formerly known as Twitter – the Alphabet Workers' Union described the cuts as “another round of pointless layoffs”.

“Our members and teammates work hard every day to build great products for our users, and the company cannot continue to lay off our colleagues while making billions every quarter,” the union wrote. “We won't stop fighting until our jobs are safe!”

Google isn't the only tech company cutting back. Over the past year, Meta — Facebook's parent company — has cut more than 20,000 jobs to appease investors. Meta's stock price gained about 178% in 2023.

Spotify said in December it was laying off 17% of its global workforce, the music streaming service third round of layoffs 2023 as it moved to cut costs and improve its profitability.

Earlier this week, Amazon laid off hundreds of employees at its Prime Video and studio units. It will also lay off about 500 employees working on its live streaming platform Drawing.

Amazon has cut thousands of jobs after ramping up hiring during the pandemic. In March, Amazon announced that it planned to do so lay off 9,000 employees, more than 18,000 employees it said it will lay off in January 2023.

Google is currently in a fierce competition with Microsoft as both companies try to lead in the field of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft has stepped up its AI offerings to compete with Google's offerings. In September, Microsoft introduced a Copilot feature that integrates artificial intelligence into products such as the Bing search engine, the Edge browser as well as Windows for its enterprise customers.