Why Google is laying off employees in India

WASHINGTON: Google has started laying off employees in India and handed pink slips to around 450 workers across its offices in the country.

The company sent emails to impacted employees on Thursday evening, sources said. The action has impacted workers across functions such as sales, marketing and partnerships. The move comes after Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent company, announced cutting 12.000 jobs or six percent of its total workforce last month. At the time, the company had said that it hired “for a different economic reality” during the pandemic, when internet usage across the world had soared.

Currently, the tech industry is seeing a large-scale restructuring after over-hiring during the pandemic on the basis of the assumption that more people will continue to live large parts of their lives online. However, that does not seem to have happened – as the pandemic has eased, so have people’s online lives.

Alphabet had announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs, around 6 per cent of its global workforce. Then, Microsoft announced that it would be cutting almost 5 per cent of its workforce, impacting 10,000 employees.

Before that, Amazon said it will be eliminating close to 18,000 employees, a number considerably higher than originally estimated. Salesforce announced it will lay off about 10 per cent of its workforce, roughly 8,000 employees, and close some offices as part of a restructuring plan.