In November 2022, news broke that Amazon was planning to lay off 10,000 of its employees, the latest in a string of layoffs across the big tech space — but today the news got even worse.
In one note from CEO Andy Jassy released on Thursday, Amazon said it will “remove additional roles,” meaning a total of more than 18,000 employees will be laid off, with the majority of affected roles belonging to Amazon Stores and PXT employees (People, Experience, and Technology).
“This year’s review was more difficult given the uncertain economy and the fact that we have been hiring rapidly over the past few years,” Jassy wrote. “In November, we communicated the difficult decision to cut a number of positions in our Devices and Books businesses, and also announced a voluntary reduction offer for certain employees in our People, Experience, and Technology (PXT) organization. J I also shared that we haven’t completed our annual planning process and that I expect there will be more role reductions in early 2023.
“Today I wanted to share the outcome of these additional reviews, which is the difficult decision to eliminate additional roles.”
The past two months have been very bad for layoffs at big tech companies. Facebook’s parent company Meta announced the layoff of 11,000 workers in November (about 13% of its workforce), while Elon Musk’s Twitter said it would lay off half of its employees (about 3,750 people). ) – then later asked some of them to come back to work. – before laying off thousands of contractors.
It didn’t stop there either. Microsoft, Snap and Lyft were among a number of other tech companies that announced layoffs in 2022, and the latest news from Amazon shows the pain is clearly not over yet.
