Google offers ‘voluntary’ buyouts to hardware and platform teams
Google’s Senior Vice President Hardware, Rick Osterloh, speaks during a launch event in San Francisco, October 4, 2017.
Stephen Lam | Reuters
Google is offering buyouts to employees in its “Platforms and Devices” unit ahead of expected cuts.
That unit includes more than 25,000 full-time employees who work on Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Google Photos, Google One, Pixel, Fitbit and Nest, according to internal documents reviewed by CNBC. The voluntary exit enrollment applies to full-time employees in the U.S. It’s unclear how many of the unit’s full-time workers are based in the U.S.
“This gives eligible P&D Googlers in my direct-reporting org the ability to voluntarily leave the company with a severance package,” wrote Rick Osterloh, senior vice president of Platforms and Devices, in a memo to employees Thursday that was viewed by CNBC.
The buyouts are a signal of expected cuts within Google as it continues prioritizing artificial intelligence. In October, new CFO Anat Ashkenazi said one of her top priorities would be to drive more cost cutting as Google expands its spending on AI infrastructure in 2025.
“Any organization can always push a little further and I’ll be looking at additional opportunities,” she said, referring to cost cutting.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the buyout program to CNBC, saying it comes after the company combined its Android and Pixel divisions last April.
“There’s tremendous momentum on this team and with so much important work ahead, we want everyone to be deeply committed to our mission and focused on building great products, with speed and efficiency,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The “voluntary exit plan” may be a fit for employees who are struggling to meet the demands of their jobs, the unit’s hybrid work environment or whose passions don’t align with the division’s mission and goal, Osterloh said. The program is the “right next step” for the unit as it aims to “operate with more efficiency and velocity,” Osterloh added.
Employees have until Feb. 20 to enroll in the exit program. Those who volunteer will find out whether they’ve been accepted on March 25, a memo states.
‘Offering buyouts first is what we asked for’
Some employees praised Google’s decision to offer buyouts rather than immediately laying off employees, according to internal posts viewed by CNBC.
“The P&D email portends layoffs, which sucks but offering buyouts first is what we asked for, is the right thing to do, and Rick deserves a lot of credit for delivering,” one employee said in an internal post that received hundreds of upvotes.
Employees this week were circulating an internal petition titled “job security” ahead of expected cost cuts, CNBC reported Tuesday. One of their asks was for the company to offer voluntary buyouts before conducting layoffs.
Last week, Google said it would be acquiring some of the engineering team from HTC Vive, one of the top virtual-reality headset makers, to “accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headset and glasses ecosystem.”
In August, Google announced new AI features for Android devices and directly installed them in its homegrown Pixel devices, a move that put its AI in front of consumers before Apple could introduce its Apple Intelligence AI suite of features to iPhone users.
Though Platforms and Device is not the juggernaut moneymaker that Google’s search ads business is, the division’s revenue rose to $10.66 billion in the third quarter, up nearly 28% from $8.34 billion the year prior. Google reported total revenue of $88.27 billion that quarter.
Google, like other tech companies, faces the potential risk of rising hardware costs if President Donald Trump’s blanket tariffs go into effect. Trump is expected to reveal more details on which specific tariffs will be placed on imports from China, Canada, and Mexico in the coming days.
In January 2024, Google laid off some employees from its hardware and central engineering teams, as well as workers in Google Assistant, its voice-activated software product.
Tech news outlet 9to5Google first reported some of details of the unit’s voluntary exit program.
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A 3D-printed miniature model of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and TikTok logo are seen in this illustration taken January 19, 2025.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
TikTok has nearly bounced back to its original traffic levels after usage fell 85% when the app temporarily shut down earlier this month, according to Cloudflare Radar.
“DNS traffic for TikTok-related domains has continued to recover since service restoration, and is currently about 10% lower than pre-shutdown level,” David Belson, head of data insight at Cloudflare, told CNBC in a statement.
DNS, short for Domain Name System, converts website names into IP addresses that browsers use to access internet resources. Cloudflare Radar is the connectivity cloud company’s hub that displays internet trends and insights with DNS to monitor global internet traffic.
TikTok briefly shutdown in the U.S. following the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a law signed by former President Joe Biden in April. That legislation required China-based ByteDance to either divest its ownership of TikTok or have the app face an effective ban in the U.S. on Jan. 19. Consequently, Apple and Google removed TikTok from their U.S. app stores to comply with the law.
The app came back online after President Donald Trump said he would postpone enforcement of the ban, signing an executive order on his first day in office to extend the law’s deadline by an additional 75 days to April 5.
In the meantime, U.S. investors from Frank McCourt to Jimmy Donaldson, known as Mr. Beast, have offered to do deals that would bring ownership of TikTok to the U.S. Trump has also expressed interest in billionaire Elon Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX and owns X, or Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison obtaining partial ownership of the app.
The data from Cloudflare shows that, for the most part, TikTok has managed to maintain the bulk of its users and creators in the U.S. despite going offline for about 14 hours and remaining off of the Apple or Google app stores.
As for its alternatives, Cloudflare’s data shows a spike in traffic the day of the temporary ban, with levels remaining steadily higher in the following week. Traffic for alternatives began to grow a week ahead of the expected shutdown, driven by the increased popularity of RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu in China, Belson said.
But traffic to TikTok alternatives peaked on Jan. 19, the day TikTok returned online, he added.
“DNS traffic fell rapidly once the shutdown ended, and has continued to slowly decline over the last week and a half,” Belson said.
‘Made peace with it’
With TikTok’s long-term future in the U.S. still uncertain, many creators are expanding their online presence to other platforms.
“I’ve kind of made peace with it going away,” said Dylan Lemay, a creator with more than 10 million followers on TikTok. “When they threatened to get rid of it the first time, that was my wake-up call to say I need to make sure that I’m prepared if this ever does happen.”
Trump first threatened to ban TikTok during his first go as president in 2020. Since then, Lemay has been putting efforts into building his followings on other platforms to protect his career as a full-time creator if TikTok is ever officially banned.
Lemay said he has found audiences on other platforms. YouTube is where he is now making his most consistent earnings. Currently, he has more than 5.6 million subscribers on YouTube, where he posts long- and short-form videos that have amassed billions of views.
“If the worst comes to worst and TikTok goes away, I have this solid foundation with a company like Google,” Lemay said. “That’s not going anywhere.”
While some successful TikTok creators have been able to find audiences on YouTube Shorts and Meta’s Instagram Reels, many have discovered that their TikTok content doesn’t translate as well to other platforms.
Noah Glenn Carter, another creator with nearly 10 million TikTok followers, has not been able to find the same kind of audience on Instagram and YouTube, where his following and viewership are significantly lower.
In the weeks leading up to the ban, Carter contacted companies he’s previously worked with on brand deals, which are agreements where brands pay creators to promote their products and services on social media. With TikTok’s future in limbo, brands are pausing or altering their agreements to include competing platforms, Carter and other creators and managers told CNBC.
In the meantime, Meta has begun offering creators deals to promote Instagram on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat and other services, CNBC reported earlier this month.
“I don’t know if I can really keep the same rates with my biggest platform going dark,” said Carter.
Other creators say they refuse to believe TikTok will ever truly get banned.
“I’m going to believe it when I see it in those 75 days,” said Michael DiCostanzo, a creator with more than 2.3 million followers on TikTok.
DiCostanzo posts his content to competing short-form video platforms, but he said other apps have yet to build the kind of environment that brought him and others success on TikTok.
“I don’t know if YouTube Shorts or Reels can ever actually replicate that sense of community,” said DiCostanzo. “If TikTok were to completely shut down, I don’t think they would get that big of a boost.”
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