Amazon layoffs: Tech giant to axe 30,000 staff in largest layoff round

Amazon is preparing to cut up to 30,000 corporate positions from today, marking its largest layoffs since it fired about 27,000 workers in late 2022 and early 2023.

The 30,000 roles represent about 10% of Amazon's roughly 350,000 corporate employees, but only a small fraction of its total workforce of 1.55 million people.

According to a Reuters report, managers of the affected teams underwent training on Monday on how to communicate with staff, with email notifications expected to begin going out from Tuesday morning.

Who is impacted?

The layoffs will impact multiple divisions, including human resources, called People Experience and Technology (PXT) internally, along with devices and services, operations, communications, and podcasting units.

This workforce reduction is a continuation of CEO Andy Jassy's broader cost-cutting initiative aimed at culling excess bureaucracy and pandemic-era overhiring. In June, Jassy signalled that artificial intelligence (AI) adoption would likely lead to further job reductions, stating that Amazon expects to "reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company".

This also comes ahead of Amazon's quarterly results announcement on Thursday.

Banking on robots

Earlier this month, leaked internal documents revealed Amazon's plans to replace up to 600,000 US workers with robots by 2027. The automation blueprint showed Amazon aiming to have 75% of its operations robotised to save $12.6 billion in labour costs between 2025 and 2027. According to reports, 160,000 warehouse roles were expected to be impacted in the next two years.

The tech giant had then denied a mass layoff plan but confirmed ongoing automation investments.

The company already operates more than 750,000 robots worldwide, but its new plan could indicate a rise in those numbers in the near future.

Previous layoffs

Smaller rounds of layoffs have been taking place at Amazon over the past few months. Bloomberg reported that around 110 roles were cut in Amazon's Wondery podcast division, which was shut down as part of a broader restructuring exercise. Wondery's chief executive officer, Jen Sargent, has also left the company.

In July, Amazon laid off several hundred employees from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing division. In May, 100 jobs were cut from its devices and services unit.

Layoffs.fyi, a website tracking tech job cuts, estimated that about 98,000 jobs have been slashed so far this year by 216 companies. For all of 2024, the figure stood at 153,000.

Source: EconomicTimes
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