Sundar Pichai updates employees on layoffs

According to a report from CNBC, Pichai said this in response to questions from employees during the meeting.

Pichai was asked when employees could expect the "end to the uncertainty and disruption that layoffs create?".

"Assuming current conditions, the second half of the year will be much smaller in scale," Pichai told the employees present in the meeting.

He underscored that Google should take a "very, very disciplined" approach to hiring more employees throughout the year.

In 2023, Pichai had expressed his apologies in a memo to the staff.

"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," he had said.

Recently, the company took action against 28 employees who participated in a sit-in protest opposing Google's involvement with the Israeli government on "Project Nimbus", a $1.2 billion cloud computing initiative.

Following the protest, nine demonstrators were arrested by the police after they occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian for more than eight hours.

The sit-ins, which occurred in New York and Sunnyvale, California, were orchestrated by "No Tech For Apartheid", a group that has been mobilizing Google employees against Project Nimbus since 2021.

In a blog post on April 18, Alphabet CEO Pichai had warned employees to not "use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics".

Pichai had said, "We have a culture of vibrant, open discussion that enables us to create amazing products and turn great ideas into action. That's important to preserve. But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics. This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted."