Google lays off an estimated 190 people in Singapore

Google's Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore has laid off an estimated 190 employees as of February 16, according to media reports. 

This accounts for 5.5% to 6% of Google's workforce in Singapore, Channel News Asia reported. It also reported that the layoffs hit people from a variety of departments including sales, Google Cloud, Google Pay, recruiting, finance and legal.

Ex-Google staff took to LinkedIn to share their experiences of finding out that they had been laid off. An ex-technical recruiter at Xoogler, Qierra C., wrote that she was watching television with her husband when she received "what I can only describe as one of the heaviest emails I've ever read".

"I had plenty of time to prepare this post beforehand (so yes, I am feeling pretty ok). But I wanted to take a moment to thank the amazing team, hiring managers, and candidates that I had the pleasure of working with during my time there," she said. 

"While I'm still navigating and processing what's next for me, I am deeply sorry that I will not be able to provide the magical recruiting experience to the candidates that are expecting my reply, but I'm sure you'll be in good hands with my colleagues," she continued.

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Deepti Krishnan, an ex-HR operations manager at Google who was also laid off last week wrote that she found out she was out of a job after she was abruptly disconnected from a video call and realised that she was looking at an 'access denied' page. "I was in denial. I kept refreshing the page hoping it was my internet that was acting up. When the page refreshed, I was now looking at an email informing me that my time here was up. An image that’ll likely stay with me for a long long time," she wrote. 

"As much as I thought I was prepared for it, at that moment, things felt unreal. A feeling of having to break up from a 15 year long relationship in a matter of seconds. The emotional upheaval that followed is hard to describe in words," she said. "While I still don’t have the answer to ‘why me?’ the deep sadness of being ‘cut off’ in seconds is not something I’ll get over easily, Google will always have a special place in my heart. Nothing can take away all that I’ve learned and become in the last 15 years and all the wonderful memories I’ve created along the way."

Other ex-Google employees such as Daren Yoong, the Asia Pacific sales enablement manager at Google Sales School, added on LinkedIn that while terribly sad and angry, he is also grateful that the "sleepless nights waiting for the announcement is over".

The layoffs come a month after Google's parent company, Alphabet, announced that it would be cutting about 12,000 jobs which is about 6% of its workforce. 

"The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here. 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," wrote Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet in an email that was posted on the company's website in January. 

"I am confident about the huge opportunity in front of us thanks to the strength of our mission, the value of our products and services, and our early investments in AI. To fully capture it, we’ll need to make tough choices. So, we’ve undertaken a rigorous review across product areas and functions to ensure that our people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company. The roles we’re eliminating reflect the outcome of that review. They cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions," he continued. 

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE has reached out to Google for a comment. 

The layoffs also come as Alphabet sees its shares plummet at over 7% after the company held an event to promote its new artificial intelligence chatbot, Bard, according to a report by CNBC.

At the event, Google fumbled when its chatbot came up with inaccurate information in a promotional video. The ad showed an incorrect description of a telescope that was used to take the first images of a planet outside our solar system. The blunder resulted in Alphabet Inc losing US$100 billion in market value and seeing its stocks slide.

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