Google’s parent company Alphabet have announced that they are to axe around 12,000 employees worldwide – about 6% of their global workforce.

The job cuts will affect departments across the company including engineering, products teams and recruitment and will begin immediately in the US.

The announcement comes soon after Microsoft confirmed that they were letting go of 10,000 people across their global workforce and Amazon said it was cutting 18,000 jobs earlier in January. According to redundancy tracking site layoffs.fyi, there have been close to 40,000 tech layoffs since the start of 2023.

CEO Sundar Pichai announced that they would offer US staff severance packages of at least 16 weeks of salary, plus two weeks for every additional year at Google - this is as well as six months of health coverage, job placement services, 2022 bonuses and remaining vacation time.

In an internal email Mr Pichai said:

“I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here,”

He told employees:

“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,”

“To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”

Mr Pichai thanked staff for "working so hard" in their roles, adding that their "contributions have been invaluable".

While more redundancies are expected globally, he added that in other countries, the process “will take longer due to local laws and practices.”