Amazon it laid off an additional 9,000 employees “in the coming weeks”. This was confirmed this Monday Andy Jassy, the CEO of the e-commerce giant. These cuts come on top of the first round layoffs It affected 18,000 workers between November last year and this January.
“The overarching tenet of our annual planning this year has been to do so while being leaner so that we continue to invest strongly in key long-term customer experiences that we believe can significantly improve the lives of customers and Amazon as a whole,” Jassy explained in an internal statement.
Economic uncertainty and possible recession It led to a change in Amazon’s strategic priorities and a second round of layoffs in just four months in an effort to cut costs. The layoffs will begin “in the coming weeks” and will be completed between mid and late April.
This new wave of layoffs is expected to hit the advertising and human resources teams—the teams that usually hit first when spending cuts need to be cut. cloud computing or Twitch, the live video platform it acquired in 2014.
The wave of layoffs in the industry
Amazon became the second tech giant to announce a second round of layoffs. The first recurring Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp owner was Meta. Last week, the social networking giant led by Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that 10,000 employees were laid off. Meta will lay off 21,000 jobs in total; Amazon will do the same with 17,000.
Economic uncertainty hit the middle of the year technology industry, accustomed to easy access to money for almost two decades. Last year, nearly 1,051 companies in the industry laid off more than 161,000 employees to weather the storm. Amazon was one of them. This 2023 may be even more difficult: in less than three full months, nearly 503 companies across the globe have thrown nearly 140,000 people on the street.