Google lays off a lot of people at incubator and Fuchsia OS

Google laid off a disproportionate number of people at various departments in its round of layoffs announced last week. There are many redundancies, including at its own operating system Fuchsia and at Area 120.

At Fuchsia, 16 percent of the 400 employees have to leave, reports The New York Times. Fuchsia is considered a future operating system for devices and it already runs on the Nest Hub Max, for example. Google released the Nest Hub Max with Android Things, a special, stripped-down version of Android for internet-of-things devices. Fuchsia was not developed around a Linux kernel, but around the Zircon kernel developed by Google itself. Google wants to use the software as a general-purpose OS with a focus on security, updates and performance for various devices.

There are relatively many more layoffs at incubator Area 120, reports Bloomberg. Three of the projects will go to Google, the rest will stop and all employees will have to leave. It is unclear how many projects and how many people are involved, but that is in any case a majority. The site of Area 120 currently reports six projects. Area 120 will stop in the course of this year.

It turned out that Google is going to lay off 12,000 people on Friday. Among other things, Google has to deal with a downturn in the field of digital advertising, from which almost all of the company’s income comes. Alphabet is certainly not the only major tech company that is going to make a round of layoffs. For example, Microsoft recently announced that 10,000 jobs will be cut, which the company says amounts to less than 5 percent of the total workforce. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said in an interview that the tech sector is facing “tough two years”. Amazon is also going to cut staff; here 18,000 employees will lose their jobs. Facebook parent company Meta announced last year that 11,000 jobs will be cut.

Area 120 by Google, January 2023