Amazon is laying off 9,000 corporate and tech workers by the end of April, adding to the 18,000 already cut up through January.
According to a memo to employees on Monday, CEO Andy Jassy said the employees affected by the cut include those in roles in AWS, Twitch, advertising, and human resources.
The New York Times is reporting the latest round of layoffs involves about 3 percent of Amazon’s corporate workforce in some of the company’s most profitable divisions, including Amazon’s cloud computing business and advertising operations.
Most of Amazon’s roughly 1.5 million employees are hourly workers who power its warehouse operations.
In the memo, Mr. Jassy wrote that the annual planning session that the company’s leaders wrapped up last week had focused on streamlining costs and head count.
“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” he wrote.
Like other Big Tech companies, Amazon’s workforce ballooned during the pandemic, reaching a peak of 1.6 million employees in 2021, according to NPR.org.
The rapid hiring “made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole,” said Jassy on Monday. “However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.”
According to the memo, the impacted teams still haven’t made their final decisions on which employees to cut. The company’s goal is to make these decisions by mid to late April and notify employees from there. Affected employees will receive severance pay, transitional health insurance, and external job placement support.”
Jassy said the company aims to make final decisions on impacted roles by “mid to late April.”
