Google is laying off 12,000 workers, or about 6 percent of its workforce, becoming the latest tech company to trim staff as the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic ebbs.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai (in the picture), the parent company of Google, informed staff Friday at the Silicon Valley giant about the cuts in an email that was also posted on the company’s news blog, AP reported from London.

It’s one of the company’s biggest-ever round of layoffs and adds to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies as they tighten their belts amid a darkening outlook for the industry. Just this month, there have been at least 48,000 job cuts announced by major companies in the sector.

“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” Pichai wrote, “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”

He said the layoffs reflect a “rigorous review” carried out by Google of its operations.

The jobs being eliminated “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions,” Pichai said. He said he was “deeply sorry” for the layoffs.

Regulatory filings illustrate how Google’s workforce swelled during the pandemic, ballooning to nearly 187,000 people by late last year from 119,000 at the end of 2019.

Pichai said that Google, founded nearly a quarter of a century ago, was “bound to go through difficult economic cycles.”

“These are important moments to sharpen our focus, reengineer our cost base, and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities,” he wrote.

There will be job cuts in the U.S. and in other unspecified countries, according to Pichai’s letter.

The tech industry has been forced to freeze hiring and cut jobs “as the clock has struck midnight on hyper growth and digital advertising headwinds are on the horizon,” Wedbush Securities analysts Dan Ives, Taz Koujalgi and John Katsingris wrote Friday.

Employment in the U.S. has been resilient despite signs of a slowing economy, and there were another 2,23,000 jobs added in December. Yet the tech sector grew exceptionally fast over the last several years due to increased demand as employees began to work remotely.

CEOs of a number of companies have taken blame for growing too fast, yet those same companies, even after the latest round of job cuts, remain much larger than they were before the economic boom from the pandemic began.

The note that Pichai wrote to Googlers and reviewed by Indianbroadcastiongworld.com also thanked those who “are leaving us”.

It said, “Thank you for working so hard to help people and businesses everywhere. Your contributions have been invaluable and we are grateful for them. While this transition won’t be easy, we’re going to support employees as they look for their next opportunity.”

In the US Google is paying its staff being laid off in full for the notification period (minimum 60 days), while offering a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and “accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting”, apart from some other benefits.

Outside the US, Google will support employees “in line with local practices”.

How this layoff will impact Google’s India workforce is still not clear.

“I’m sure you have many questions about how we’ll move forward. We’ll be organizing a town hall on Monday (January 30). Check your calendar for details. Until then, please take good care of yourselves as you absorb this difficult news,” Pichai said in his email to colleagues.