There has been a huge tech shake-up, and according to MSNBC Google employees found themselves locked out of their emails and systems with no warning.
On Friday, Alphabet owned Google announced it was cutting 12,000 employees, roughly 6% of the full-time workforce.
While employees had been bracing for a potential layoff, they are questioning leadership about the criteria for layoffs which surprised some employees, who woke up to find their access to company properties cut off.
Some of the laid-off employees had been long-tenured or recently promoted, raising questions about the criteria used to decide whose jobs were cut.
Shortly after CEO Sundar Pichai’s initial email to employees Friday morning, Google’s search boss Prabhakar Raghavan sent an email to employees saying he “also feels the responsibility to reach out” and asking for them to save questions for next week’s town hall.
There will be “bumps in the road” as the organization moves forward with the layoffs, Raghavan noted.
The company provided an FAQ for the layoffs, which CNBC has seen, but employees have complained that it doesn’t give much detail on many answers.
Employees have flooded Dory, the company’s question-asking platform, and set up virtual communities to figure out who’s been laid off and why.
Directors have been telling employees to hold questions for the town hall taking place next week.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The scramble highlights the challenges Google could face in maintaining a supportive and productive company culture for its restive workforce of more than 160,000 full-time employees.
Further confrontations are possible, as the company said it plans to lay off international employees but has yet to determine which ones.
So far in the U.S., employees have been laid off across business units including Chrome, Cloud, and its experimental Area 120 unit. Some employees working on the company’s artificial intelligence programs were also laid off, according to Bloomberg.
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“Alphabet leadership claims ‘full responsibility’ for this decision, but that is little comfort to the 12,000 workers who are now without jobs,” said Parul Koul, executive chair of Alphabet Workers Union-CWA in a statement Friday. “This is egregious and unacceptable behavior by a company that made $17 billion dollars in profit last quarter alone.”
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