Amazon.com Inc is laying off an additional 9,000 employees, adding to cuts that were already the largest round of firings in the company’s history.
Amazon chief executive officer Andy Jassy announced the cuts internally on Monday, saying they would occur in the coming weeks and primarily affect Amazon Web Services, human resources, advertising and the Twitch livestreaming service groups.
“Given the uncertain economy in which we reside and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,” he said in his memo, published later to Amazon’s corporate blog.
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Twitch’s incoming CEO said in his own blog post that cuts at the San Francisco-based subsidiary would total about 400 people.
A spokesperson declined to detail how Amazon was apportioning the rest of the layoffs.
The e-commerce giant has been laying off mostly corporate workers after a hiring spree during the COVID-19 pandemic left it with too many people.
The company recently wrapped up a round of job cuts that totaled about 18,000 workers. Those layoffs began in November last year and landed heaviest on Amazon’s recruiting and human resources teams, its sprawling retail group and devices teams.
The cuts announced on Monday come less than a week after Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc said it was laying off another 10,000 employees and closing about 5,000 additional open roles in its own second major round of job cuts.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees during a recent internal meeting that the economic climate of layoffs and restructuring could last “many years.”
Other tech giants have reduced their headcount, including Google parent company Alphabet Inc, Microsoft Corp, Dell Technologies Inc and IBM.
As of early last month, more than 67,000 jobs had been eliminated across the industry since the beginning of the year, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.
It is a continuation of a trend from last year, when the tech sector announced 97,171 job cuts, up 649 percent compared with the previous year, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.
Amazon employed 1.54 million people worldwide at the end of December last year. The vast majority of those were hourly employees who pack and ship products in warehouses. Before the first round of layoffs began in November last year, the company said it had roughly 350,000 corporate employees.
The company has periodically worked to rekindle growth in its retail division, but the current slowdown is also hitting Amazon Web Services, the source of most of Amazon’s profit in the past few years.
Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said he expected slower growth rates for Amazon’s cloud unit “the next few quarters.”
Expansion in Amazon’s lucrative advertising business has also slowed.
Jassy said the latest cuts came after teams completed another phase of the company’s annual planning process.
For the past several years most of Amazon’s businesses added significantly to their ranks, he said.
“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” he said.
Amazon’s goal is for teams that are on the hook for cuts to determine which positions to eliminate by mid to late April, Jassy said.
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