Google parent Alphabet Inc. It is cutting 12,000 jobs in the latest round to hit the technology sector.
CEO Sundar Pichai announced the cuts in a memo to Google employees that were later shared online in a company blog post.
“This means saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people who we’ve worked hard to hire and have loved working with,” Pichai said. “I deeply apologize for this. The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions I made here.”
The cuts represent more than 6% of the company’s workforce, according to Reuters. It was not immediately clear which teams would be affected, but they are expected to affect workers in the United States and globally, according to Pichai’s note.
The technology sector has seen large job losses recently amid a slowing global economy. Google’s announcement came 48 hours after Microsoft announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs, and coincides with the first phase of cuts previously announced by Amazon that will eventually affect a total of 18,000 workers.
Other tech companies that have announced layoffs in recent months include Facebook parent company Meta, Salesforce, Twitter, and Snap. In total, tech industry employers cut about 195,000 jobs last year, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited a website that tracks job cuts.
The job cuts mark an abrupt end to a period of rapid hiring in the tech sector that coincided with an economic boom amid the pandemic. But that rapid growth brought with it rising inflation, a phenomenon that prompted the Federal Reserve to aggressively raise interest rates. The high rates have combined with numerous other factors around the world, including the war in Ukraine and China’s Covid-19 lockdown, to affect the global economy.