Amazon, the $1 trillion e-commerce - behemoth, announced a second round of layoffs, with 9,000 employees to be let go. This follows the 18,000 layoffs announced in January and brings the total to 27,000. Most of the cuts are expected to affect Amazon Web Services, People Experience and Technology Solutions, advertising and Twitch, the video livestreaming service. *
In a statement, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that due to the current economic uncertainty, the company had chosen to be more streamlined with their costs and their headcount. Final decisions on the impacted positions are expected to be made by mid- to late April, when the affected roles will be communicated to employees. *
The layoffs come shortly after Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced over 10,000 layoffs. Amazon’s cloud business has seen a slowdown due to businesses looking to optimize their cloud spending, so the cuts are also impacting the company’s advertising unit, as well as Twitch and other corporate divisions. Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear is stepping down as CEO and Twitch will lay off “just over” 400 people. *
Shares of Amazon fell more than 1.5% on Monday. In the last year, Amazon’s stock has lost 40% of its value and in its most recent earnings report, the company reported a net loss of $2.7 billion in 2022. *
Despite this, Jassy said that the cuts were made with the intention of making the company “leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve the lives of customers and Amazon as a whole.” He also said that management teams at Amazon did their “appropriate diligence” in determining which roles to cut. *
The decision to cut jobs comes with a bittersweet feeling for Amazon, as the company continues to face economic uncertainty while also striving to invest robustly in the customer experience.