Alphabet Inc. began laying off Canadian employees on Monday as part of its previously announced reduction of 12,000 staff members globally.
Google Canada spokesperson Lauren Skelly confirmed to BetaKit that layoff notices were sent to impacted Canadian employees starting today.
The Google and YouTube parent company has around 2,500 employees in Canada.
As first reported by The Globe and Mail, while American staff were let go when the six percent reduction was first announced, international workers, including those in Canada, had yet to be informed about whether they were affected.
According to The Globe, the Google and YouTube parent company has around 2,500 employees in Canada. Skelly refused to share specifics about Alphabet’s Canadian workforce size, how many people are being cut, and what roles were affected.
The Canadian impact follows the closure of Alphabet’s DeepMind Technologies office in Edmonton last month. Edmonton-based DeepMind employees were not immediately laid-off as part of that closure, with Alphabet offering researchers the option to relocate to other DeepMind offices in Toronto or Montréal.
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Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai attributed the cost-cutting moves to “periods of dramatic growth” over the past two years in which the corporation “hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Canadians continue to be affected by Big Tech layoffs even as the country is seeing a strong labour market and demand for tech jobs. In recent weeks, Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, and others have all reduced their global workforces. This also comes as Canadian tech startups –big and small alike– are also having to make cost-cutting measures.
Globally, January saw more than 68,000 tech workers from 219 companies laid off, a number that is higher than any month since the pandemic started, according to Layoffs.fyi.