Tech giant Google is learnt to have sacked around 450 employees across various departments in India. The employees were reportedly informed of their termination through mail late at night on Thursday.
According to Moneycontrol, the mail was sent by Sanjay Gupta, Country Head and Vice President of Google India, Hindu businessline, which also stated a report mentioning its sources, said that Google India is yet to respond to its Email sent with queries on the development. Right now, it is not clear whether the 453 layoffs include the 12,000 job cuts announced by Google parent company Alphabet Inc. last month.
On Thursday, Sundar Pichai, who is CEO of Google parent Alphabet Inc., said the job cuts were made in order to act decisively as the company’s growth plummeted over the last few months.
According to a report by Bloomberg, CEO Pichai said, “If you don’t act clearly and decisively and early, we can compound the problem and make it much worse. These are decisions I needed to make.”
In another developments in the tech world, Alphabet-owned YouTube has also appointed Neal Mohan, an Indian-American, as its new CEO after its current head revealed that she will be signing off from her role to focus on “family, health, and personal projects”.
Google is the most recent among the Silicon Valley giants looking to lighten payrolls after years of abundant growth and hiring. Earlier in January, Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts or nearly 5 per cent of its workforce. Amazon also is cutting 18,000 jobs. Last year, Meta let go over 11,000 workers, 13 per cent of its workforce, in its first major layoff.
Search engine company Yahoo Inc is also planning to slack off more than 20 per cent of its total workforce as part of a huge restructuring of its advertisement tech unit, Axios reported, citing company executives.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk-led Twitter has, allegedly shut down two of its three offices in India, asking its staff to work from home. In 2022, the social media platform snapped off 90 per cent of its staff in the country, leaving only a dozen on the payroll. The struggling microblogging company is looking to snip costs and keep its balance sheet in the black.
Since November 2022, layoffs by the US tech industry have grabbed headlines. Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon have together slacked off approximately 200,000 IT professionals—at least 30 per cent of them Indians on H-1B and L1 visas—to leave. Google will also be letting go of more employees in regions other than India.
