Google has fired an employee that leaked its plans to give a 10 per cent salary hike to all 23,000 of its employees across the world next year, according to a media report today.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt had written an email to employees on Tuesday about the salary hike plan, which was leaked to the media by an employee. Within hours, Google notified its staff that it had terminated the leaker, according to website CNN Money.com

According to the report on the website, a Google spokesman declined to comment on the issue, or on the memo.

On Wednesday, a media report said, "Google Inc is giving a 10 per cent raise to all of its 23,000 employees."

When asked about the issue, Google India's spokesman said, "While we don't typically comment on internal matters, we do believe that competitive compensation plans are important to the future of the company."

Google, which has a strong presence in India, has a workforce of about about 2,000 employees.

The planned pay hike comes as Google steps up its battle with competitors like Facebook Inc to secure talented staff.

About 10 per cent of Facebook's employees are Google veterans.

In the past few weeks, Google has seen top minds like YouTube Co-Founder and CEO Chad Hurley, AdMob Co-Founder Omar Hamoui and Google Maps and Wave creator Lars Rasmussen leave to pursue new opportunities.

This is not the first time Google has hiked salaries to retain employees. In 2009, it repriced millions of employee stock options after their value was eroded by a sharp decline in Google's shares between 2007 and 2009.