Alphabet-owned Google announced an unspecified number of layoffs on Wednesday (17 April) in the latest cost-cutting measure from the search engine giant.

Google and the wider tech industry have been slimming their workforce throughout 2024. According to data compiled by Layoffs,fyi, 254 tech companies have already laid off 74,591 employees in 2024.

According to Business Insider, the unspecified number of layoffs will affect Google’s finance department. The publication quoted an employee stating the restructuring was “pretty large-scale.”

The cuts also include the restructuring of some teams, which will include jobs moving to hubs the company has been investing in, including India, Chicago, Atlanta and Dublin.

“Throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers and align their resources to their biggest product priorities,” a Google spokesperson said.

Google said the layoffs were part of the company “simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers.”

The technology industry began to see large swathes of layoffs in 2022 which ran throughout 2023. At the end of 2023, the number of technology industry layoffs totalled 262,735, according to Layoffs.fyi.

Although the losses in 2024 have not been as large, the industry remains fearful following layoffs in large companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, TikTok, Take-Two, and Mozilla.