Amazon has made another round of job cuts, affecting fewer than 1,000 employees across several teams, the company confirmed on Wednesday. The cuts are the latest in a series of small reductions since a larger round of 30,000 job cuts that began last year and continued into January.
The job cuts comes even as CEO Andy Jassy prepares the company for a record $220 billion spending spree on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. In , it has been reaching out to former employees, including some laid off in earlier rounds, about open roles in AWS and its AI businesses.
The latest layoffs hit parts of Amazon’s customer service, marketplace support and retail engineering operations, with employees in the US, India and the UK affected, according to Business Insider.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company had eliminated “a small number” of roles, primarily in its Stores business. “We’re always looking at our team structures to ensure we’re best set up to move fast as we innovate for customers,” the spokesperson said.
The company said it had “adjusted parts of our Stores business” because the new structure would better support its priorities. “We’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles,” the spokesperson added.
Anxious employees share posts on Slacks
In the Slack channel, workers asked whether all notices had been sent, how medical leave would be handled, and whether they would retain access to Slack and Outlook during their notice periods.
Others wondered whether cuts would reach Mexico and elsewhere in Europe.
For many employees, the immediate question was whether they could find another job inside Amazon before their employment ended.
One post asked whether workers who received an outside offer during the 90-day notification period would have to forfeit severance if they left early.
The layoffs to its retail unit coincide with one of Amazon’s biggest shopping days, which it calls Prime Big Deal Days. The promotion started on Tuesday and runs through Wednesday, offering varying discounts.
What Jeff Bezos said?
Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, said in a Fox News interview aired Wednesday, that continued job cuts have been necessary because the company overhired during the pandemic. “People were staying home and they were ordering, and it was an incredible, stressful period for us, by the way,” he said when asked about the 30,000 jobs lost in the previous round.
“The whole team worked extremely hard and did so much, but we really grew our head count.”
Amazon is not alone in pairing job cuts with a bigger AI push. Meta eliminated roughly 8,000 roles in May while shifting thousands of other workers into AI initiatives, and Microsoft cut more than 5,000 jobs across July and September.