Amazon plans to cut 9,000 more jobs over the next few weeks, CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to employees Monday.
The job cuts would mark the second-largest round of layoffs in the company’s history, adding to the 18,000 employees the company said it would lay off in January. However, the company’s workforce has doubled during the pandemic amid a hiring surge across nearly the entire tech sector.
In the memo, Jassy said the second phase of the company’s annual planning process – which determined which areas of the company should be cut – concluded this month and resulted in more job cuts. He said Amazon will continue to hire in some strategic areas.
“Some may be wondering why we didn’t announce these role cuts with the ones we announced a few months ago. The short answer is that not all teams were finished with their analysis by late fall; and rather than rushing through those reviews without due diligence, we chose to share those decisions as we made them so people had the information as quickly as possible,” Jassy said.
This time, the job cuts will hit profitable areas for the company, including its cloud computing unit AWS and its burgeoning advertising business. Twitch, Amazon’s gaming platform, will also see some layoffs, as will Amazon’s PXT organizations, which handle HR and other functions.
The previous layoffs had also hit PXT, the company’s store division, which includes the company’s e-commerce business as well as the company’s brick-and-mortar stores like Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, and other divisions like the one that runs the virtual assistant Alexa.
Amazon has also made cuts in other areas. Earlier this month, the company announced it would pause construction of its northern Virginia headquarters, though the first phase of that project will open this June and will house 8,000 employees.
Like other tech companies, including Facebook parent Meta and Google parent Alphabet, Amazon has increased hiring during the pandemic to meet demand from Americans who are away from home and increasingly buying goods online to keep ahead to protect against the virus. The workforce — which includes both warehouse workers and corporate functions — doubled to more than 1.6 million people in about two years. But demand slowed as the worst of the pandemic subsided — and the company began pausing or canceling its warehouse expansion plans last year to ensure it wasn’t wasting money unnecessarily.
As fears of a possible recession began to mount, other adjustments were also made in specific areas. In recent months, the company has shut down a subsidiary that has been selling fabrics for nearly 30 years and shut down its hybrid virtual care service, Amazon Care, among other cost-cutting measures.
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(This article was not edited by News18 staff and is published by a syndicated news outlet feed.)
