Amazon has conducted another round of layoffs globally. This time, the company said, it cut fewer than 1,000 jobs, largely in its retail teams across multiple countries, including India, the US, and the UK. These job cuts are part of Amazon’s broader layoffs that are expected to impact about 30,000 jobs globally.
As per reports from Reuters and Business Insider, employees of Amazon’s Stores business, which oversees the e-commerce website, were impacted by the layoffs. "We've adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities," an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters. Though the company did not give an exact number for those impacted.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in a Fox News interview aired on Wednesday that the continuing job cuts were necessary because the company had overhired during the pandemic. "People were staying home and they were ordering, and it was an incredible, stressful period for us, by the way,” he said.
The layoffs come right at the start of Amazon’s sale season on its e-commerce platform. In India, the Amazon Great Indian Festival sale began on October 7 for Prime members, and now is available for all users. Globally, the company also kicked off the Prime Big Deal Days sale on October 6.
Amazon tells employees of layoffs over email
On Tuesday, reports said, the employees had received emails notifying them that their roles had been eliminated, something that we have had companies like Oracle and Meta do in the past as well. Many employees reportedly discussed severance, access to internal job postings, notice periods, and other details on an internal Amazon Slack channel that is said to have about 37,000 members.
These messages suggested that the job cuts were made across multiple teams, including customer service, selling partner services, marketplace support and engineering roles in Amazon's retail business. Some employees were reportedly asking whether the reductions would extend to Mexico and other parts of Europe.
The layoffs followed months of anxiety among Amazon's corporate workforce over the possibility of another widespread round of cuts, according to reports. It is believed that some leaders within the company had scaled back planning for the next several quarters partly because they expected teams or priorities to change.
At the same time, Amazon prepares to spend a record $220 billion on data centres, chips and other infrastructure for AI. The company has also reportedly contacted former employees, including some laid off in earlier rounds, about open roles in AWS and its AI businesses. Amazon is not alone in combining job cuts with a larger AI push. Meta eliminated roughly 8,000 roles in May while shifting thousands of workers into AI initiatives, and Microsoft cut more than 5,000 jobs across July and September. Oracle, too, has announced multiple layoff rounds in recent months.
