Amazon to eliminate 9,000 more jobs in 2nd round; count reaches 27,000

Mass eliminations across big techs continue with U.S.-based e-commerce behemoth Amazon Inc laying off 9,000 more positions after around 18,000 layoffs in January this year.

In a letter to the company employees, Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon, said after concluding the second phase of the operating plan this past week, the company has decided to eliminate 9,000 more positions in the next few weeks — mostly in AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch. "This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term," he said.

Jassy said some may ask why Amazon didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones announced a couple of months ago. "The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible."

He said the same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely, which roles will be impacted. "Once those decisions have been made (our goal is to have this complete by mid to late April), we will communicate with the impacted employees."

Amazon will support those who will be leaving and the packages include a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support, he said.

Jassy said the overriding tenet of Amazon's annual planning this year was to be "leaner" while doing so in a way that enables it to invest robustly in key long-term customer experiences.

The company has said the layoffs are a part of "re-prioritisation decisions" that sometimes "led to role reductions, sometimes led to moving people from one initiative to another, and sometimes led to new openings where we don’t have the right skills match from our existing team members".

"This initially led us to eliminate 18,000 positions (which we shared in January); and, as we completed the second phase of our planning this month, it led us to these additional 9,000 role reductions," said the Amazon CEO, adding that e-comm giant plans to do "limited hiring" in some of its businesses in strategic areas in near future.

The latest layoffs at Amazon come just a week after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's own disclosure in which the social media giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it will lay off 10,000 more people after announcing 11,000 job cuts last year, amid a dramatic slowdown in revenue in 2022.

The year 2022 and the first three months of 2023 have witnessed massive layoffs across companies all over the world. The tech sector, especially, has been the most affected as companies grapple with cost-cutting measures amid dwindling revenues.

Google recently sacked around 12,000 roles in one of the highest headcount reductions in the past year. Microblogging platform Twitter sacked 50% of its workforce and is planning to slash its workforce further. Snap, the parent company of the social media platform Snapchat, sacked 20% of its staff. There are dozens of other tech and non-tech companies that have resorted to brutal layoffs amid the global downturn.