The massive job cuts are just the latest incident to shake the technology sector. It comes days after rival Microsoft Corp said it would lay off 10,000 workers.
global giants Amazon And Meta has also announced massive layoffs in the last few months.
The job losses impact the company’s teams, including recruiting and some corporate functions, as well as some engineering and product teams.
The layoffs are global and affect US employees immediately, Google said.
The news comes during a period of economic uncertainty as well as technological promise, with Google and Microsoft investing in a new area of software known as generative artificial intelligence.
“I am confident of the enormous opportunity ahead of us, thanks to the strength of our mission, the value of our products and services, and our early investments in AI,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in the note.
In October, the company reported earnings and revenue that missed analysts’ expectations.
Profit declined 27% to $13.9 billion compared to the prior year.
At the time, Pichai said Google would curtail its spending and Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said the number of new jobs would drop by more than half in the fourth quarter compared to the previous period.
Bloomberg reported that according to human-resources consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the largest number of job cuts in 2022 were in the tech sector — 97,171 for the year, a 649% increase over the previous year.