Google announced Friday that it planned to cut about 12,000 jobs, joining other tech giants who are downsizing staff by the thousands.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, confirmed the layoffs in an email sent to Google employees, which was later published in a Google blog post.
The job cuts would reduce the company’s workforce by about 6%.
“This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I’m deeply sorry for that,” Pichai wrote. “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.
“Over the past two years, we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Pichai said the layoffs reflect the result of a “rigorous review” of Google’s operations. The jobs being eliminated will be “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels, and regions,” he said.