As of today, 9,000 more individuals will lose their employment as a result of Amazon’s announcement of yet another sizable wave of layoffs. The business stated the layoffs will affect employees in its Amazon cloud unit, Twitch game division, advertising, and PXT (experience and technology solutions) arm in a memo released by CEO Andy Jassy this morning.
The announcement follows Amazon’s announcement of 18,000 layoffs just a few months prior, the majority of which were planned to affect its PXT and Amazon Stores divisions. Although Amazon never officially acknowledged any number when it was first reported back in November, the news itself was an expansion on a prior figure that was supposedly in the 10,000-person area. In any case, the revelation from today sheds light on Amazon’s phased approach to workforce reduction efforts, which Jassy discussed in his memo.
Jassy confirmed that they chose to take their time and let people know once each team had largely finished their analyses rather than racing to conclude their assessments so they could make all of their redundancies public at once. It is important to note that, with 1.5 million employees worldwide, Amazon is one of the biggest employers in the world. This is about seven times as many as Google parent company Alphabet, which laid off 12,000 people less than two months ago. Jassy added that they still haven’t worked out all the details of their budget cuts, including which specific functions will be eliminated.
Some people might wonder why we didn’t include these role reductions in the ones we already disclosed, Jassy wrote. The simple answer is that not all of the teams completed their analysis by the end of the fall. Rather than rushing through these assessments without the necessary care, we decided to disclose these conclusions as we made them so that individuals could get the information as soon as possible. The same is true for this message, as the impacted teams are still deciding which jobs will be specifically affected. We’re hoping to finish this process by mid- to late-April. After those decisions have been taken, we’ll let the impacted employees know.