Google on Wednesday announced that it is cutting hundreds of staff from across its Assistant, hardware and engineering teams.

The most notable casualties of this latest round of cuts are James Park and Eric Friedman, the co-founders of fitness tracker company Fitbit, which the Alphabet-owned Google acquired in 2021 for $2.1 billion.

The company said that hundreds will be laid off at Google’s Voice Assistant unit, with a few hundred roles being eliminated in the hardware team which contains the Pixel, Next and Fitbit brands, and hundreds more in its central engineering team.

While not specifying the number of roles impacted, a spokesperson for Google told Reuters: "Throughout second-half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organisational changes, which include some role eliminations globally.”

The news comes a year after Alphabet announced plans to cut 6 per cent of its global workforce, amounting to around 12,000 jobs.

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