Alphabet, the parent company of Google, said on Friday that it plans to cut 12,000 jobs, becoming the latest technology company to reduce its work force after a hiring spree during the pandemic and amid concerns about a broader economic slowdown.

The job cuts are the company’s largest ever, amounting to about 6 per cent of the company’s global work force.

Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s chief executive, said the company expanded too rapidly during the pandemic, when demand for digital services boomed, and now must refocus on products and technology core to the company’s future, like artificial intelligence.

“We hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today,” Pichai said in a note to employees posted on the company’s website.

“I’m deeply sorry for that. The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here,” he elaborated.

Google joins a list of other technology companies that have laid off workers after concluding they had overextended under the belief that the pandemic-fueled boom represented a new normal. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Twitter are among others who have announced thousands of job cuts.

More than 190,000 jobs have been cut by technology firms since the start of 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi.

Alphabet had nearly 187,000 employees as of the end of September compared with about 150,000 a year ago.

In a note titled “A difficult decision to set us up for the future”, Pichai said the job cuts would run across product areas, job responsibilities and geographies. It comes at a time when Google is facing competition from rivals offering new ways to search for information on the internet. ChatGPT, created by a company called OpenAI, has dazzled users by providing clearly written answers to questions and queries.

“These are important moments to sharpen our focus, re-engineer our cost base, and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities,” Pichai said. “Being constrained in some areas allows us to bet big on others.”

Even as Alphabet and other tech giants trim their work forces and pledge to become more efficient, they remain massively profitable. In 2021, Alphabet had profit of $76 billion and revenue of nearly $258 billion.

New York Times News Service