After the largest round of firings in the company’s history, Amazon.com Inc. is again laying off an additional 9,000 employees.
How Did This Happen?
The news of layoffs was announced by the Chief executive officer Andy Jassy internally Monday.
He said that the cuts would occur in the coming weeks and primarily affect Amazon Web Services, human resources, advertising and the Twitch livestreaming service groups.
In his memo, he said, “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,”.
This is later on published to Amazon’s corporate blog.
It appears that the e-commerce giant has been laying off mostly corporate workers after a hiring spree during the pandemic which left Amazon with too many resources.
Last month, the company wrapped up a round of job cuts that totalled about 18,000 workers.
It can not be denied that these layoffs landed heaviest on Amazon’s recruiting and human resources teams, its sprawling retail group and devices teams.
After witnessing a hike of 16% this year, Amazon shares fell 1.7% to $97.29 at 11:25 a.m. in New York.
Facebook Laying Off 10000 Employees
Interestingly, this news of the cuts come less than a week after Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. announced that 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 chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg told its employees that the economic climate of layoffs and restructuring could last “many years”, during a recent internal meeting.
Besides this, other tech giants such as Google parent company Alphabet Inc, Microsoft Corp, Dell Technologies Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. also have reduced their headcounts in recent times.
Since the beginning of this year, more than 67,000 jobs have been eliminated across the industry as of early February, as per the data compiled by Bloomberg.
In a note, D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte said, “We are not surprised,” pointing to recession concerns as a backdrop to Amazon’s plans.
This seems to be a continuation of a worrying trend from 2022, when the tech sector announced 97,171 job cuts.
This is up 649% compared with the previous year, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.
Last month, Amazon said that their operating profit may continue to slump in the current quarter, hit by the financial impact of consumers and cloud customers clamping down on spending.
Besides this, the company has scaled back or shut down entire services like its virtual primary care offering for employers in recent months.
