Amazon to cut 9,000 jobs, bringing total layoffs to 27,000

Robert Besser
23 Mar 2023, 05:21 GMT+10

In a memo to staff sent this week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company plans to cut another 9,000 jobs in the next few weeks
This is the second largest round of layoffs in the company's history
Jassy stated that the second phase of Amazon's annual planning process, completed this month, led to the additional job cuts

SEATTLE, Washington: In a memo to staff sent this week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company plans to cut another 9,000 jobs in the next few weeks, the second largest round of layoffs in the company's history, and adding to the 18,000 staff it laid off in January.

This year, the tech companies have announced tens of thousands of firings.

In his memo, Jassy stated that the second phase of Amazon's annual planning process, completed this month, led to the additional job cuts, but the company will still hire more staff in some strategic areas.

"Some may ask why we did not announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall," he said.

The firings will even hit the company's profitable areas, including its cloud computing unit, AWS, and growing advertising business.

Previous layoffs by the tech giant included its stores division, PXT, which encompasses its e-commerce business and brick-and-mortar stores, such as Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go.

Earlier this month, Amazon announced it would postpone the construction of its headquarters in northern Virginia.

To meet the demand from homebound Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon, along with other tech companies, such as Meta and Alphabet, increased hiring during that period, when the number of Amazon's warehouse and office staff doubled to more than 1.6 million people in some two years.

But as demand slowed last year after the worst of the pandemic had ended, Amazon began pausing or cancelling its warehouse expansion plans.

Due to the uncertain economy and the "uncertainty that exists in the near future," the company has chosen to be more streamlined, Jassy said.