In an announcement to his staff on Monday, CEO Andy Jassy revealed that Amazon is set to eliminate 9,000 more jobs within the next few weeks.
This round of layoffs will be the second largest in the company’s history, and it comes on top of the 18,000 employees that were previously laid off in January. Despite the significant staff reductions, Amazon’s workforce actually doubled during the pandemic, reflecting the hiring surge experienced across the entire tech sector.
Jassy explained that these job cuts are a result of the second phase of the company’s annual planning process, which determines the areas of the business that need trimming. However, he assured that Amazon will continue to hire in certain strategic areas.
Addressing the reason for not announcing these role reductions alongside the previous layoffs, Jassy stated that not all teams had completed their analyses in the late fall. Instead of rushing through the assessments, Amazon chose to share the decisions as soon as they were made to provide people with the necessary information.
The job cuts will specifically impact profitable areas of the company, including its cloud computing unit AWS, its advertising business, and subsidiaries such as Twitch. Additionally, layoffs will also occur in Amazon’s PXT organizations, responsible for human resources and other functions.
Prior layoffs have already affected PXT, the company’s stores division, which includes its e-commerce business, brick-and-mortar stores like Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, and departments such as the one managing the virtual assistant Alexa.
Amazon has been making cutbacks in various other areas as well. Earlier this month, the company announced a pause in the construction of its headquarters building in northern Virginia. However, the first phase of the project is still scheduled to open in June, welcoming 8,000 employees.
Similar to other tech companies like Facebook parent Meta and Google parent Alphabet, Amazon significantly expanded its workforce during the pandemic to meet the rising demand for online shopping. However, as the worst of the pandemic subsided, demand slowed and the company had to adjust. As fears of a potential recession grew, Amazon made trims in different areas to cut costs.
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