- Google is firing hundreds of employees from its hardware, engineering, and digital assistant departments.
- The affected employees will be able to apply for other Google positions that are open.
- Amazon is firing around 500 employees on Twitch alone in the course of a “very hard day.”
- Just over a year ago, 400 employees from Amazon were let go from Twitch as part of a similar program.
As part of its cost-cutting measures, Google is firing hundreds of employees from its hardware, engineering, and digital assistant departments. Employees in the hardware team for augmented reality and the voice-activated Google Assistant are among those impacted.
There will be layoffs in the company’s primary engineering group as well. The layoffs were announced by 9to5Google and Semafor. The affected employees will be able to apply for other Google positions that are open.
Google and Amazon
In a statement published on social media platform X, the Alphabet Workers Union, which advocates for a portion of the company’s workforce, denounced the job losses and said the business could not keep letting go of its people while earning billions of dollars each quarter.
Citing a move to “rightsize” the business, Amazon has made several hundred workforce cuts across its Twitch, Amazon MGM Studios, and Prime Video departments. Amazon is firing around 500 employees on Twitch alone in the course of a “very hard day.”
Amazon has a history of implementing large-scale layoffs; just over a year ago, 400 employees were let go from Twitch as part of a similar program. In November 2023, Amazon Games also dissolved a number of its departments and over 200 employees. This year, Twitch announced that it was discontinuing its service in South Korea due to unreasonably high streaming fees.
Clancy explained the layoffs by saying that the company decided to increase investment and concentrate on content and product projects that have the greatest potential impact while decreasing or stopping investments in other areas. The company is currently being sized according to its existing business scale as well as cautious projections of its future growth.
These layoffs are consistent with recent trends in the tech industry, which has experienced a sharp increase in employee layoffs. More jobs have been lost in the games business this year than in 2023 as a result of Unity’s over 1800 personnel reductions and the Twitch layoffs.
