Google Laying Off Unspecified Number of Employees Amid Shifting Priorities

Google is laying off an unspecified number of employees and shifting some roles to other countries as part of a continuing effort to cut costs.

The employees will be able to apply for other roles at the company and some of the impacted roles will move to hubs in India, Chicago, Atlanta and Dublin, a Google spokesperson told Reuters in a report posted Wednesday (April 17).

The spokesperson did not specify the number of layoffs or the positions impacted but said the layoffs are not companywide, according to the report.

“Throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers and align their resources to their biggest product priorities,” the spokesperson said, per the report.

It was reported in January that Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned employees to expect more job cuts this year, saying that the company has ambitious goals and needs to make tough choices to create the capacity to invest in those goals.

“These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year’s reductions, and will not touch every team,” Pichai said at the time, referring to the 12,000 jobs Google cut in early 2023. “But I know it’s very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted.”

The company made additional job cuts in January, laying off 100 employees at YouTube’s creator partnership team and several hundred in the voice assistant unit and in the hardware team behind Pixel, Nest and Fitbit.

Other tech companies have made cuts this year as well.

It was reported April 5 that Apple was laying off 614 employees in the first major job cuts that company has made since the pandemic. It was not specified which projects the impacted employees were working on, but the layoffs came about a month after reports that Apple canceled its electric car project.

On April 3, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it was eliminating hundreds of roles in two of its organizations as it focuses on other areas. Those job cuts will impact several hundred roles in the company’s Sales, Marketing and Global Services organization and a few hundred in its Physical Stores Technology team.