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Google confirmed the layoffs but didn’t specify which teams or how many employees were impacted.
Google has laid off hundreds of staff across multiple teams, as the tech giant undergoes a period of reorganisation.
One Google employee – Thomas Wouters – claimed on Mastodon that everyone he works with directly “had their roles reduced”. Wouters claims to work on Google’s Python team. He also claims that he’s been asked “to onboard their replacements, people told to take those very same roles just in a different country who are not any happier about it”.
In an X post, a Google PM for Flutter and Dart claimed the layoffs had affected “a LOT of teams,” and that “lots of great projects lost people”.
CNBC said it learned that at least 200 employees from Google’s ‘core’ teams were laid off and that some roles were moved to India and Mexico. Meanwhile, a Google spokesperson confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch, but did not specify which teams were impacted or how many staff were laid off.
Michael Thomsen, a product manager for Dart and Flutter, said there was “misinformation circulating” about the two teams and claimed there are no strategy changes and no change in team size – but that “some DevOps roles” are moving to new locations.
“This is not downplaying the personal impact to those individuals that were impacted to role location moves,” Thomsen said. “I value and miss every one of them.”
The confirmation of layoffs at Google follows a confirmation from the tech giant in January that it cut hundreds of staff from multiple divisions. A spokesperson told SiliconRepublic.com at the time that the company was “responsibly investing” in its biggest priorities and “the significant opportunities ahead”.
The number of job losses from that wave of cuts was unknown, but a report by The Verge suggested that at least a thousand staff were impacted as a few hundred staff were cut from multiple divisions, including its core engineering and Google Assistant teams.
Job losses in the tech sector appear to be mounting this year, mirroring the wave of cuts witnessed in 2023 as companies worked to become more efficient. Last month, a leaked memo showed that Tesla opted to cut more than 10pc of its staff after it suffered a drop in vehicle sales.
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