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Amazon is laying off another 9,000 employees.
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That’s on top of the 18,000 job cuts announced earlier this year.
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CEO Andy Jassy said the additional cuts weren’t announced until cost-cutting analysis was finished.
Amazon is laying off an additional 9,000 employees, the e-commerce giant’s CEO Andy Jassy said Monday.
The layoffs will come on top of the cuts to 18,000 positions that the company disclosed in January.
“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago,” Jassy wrote in a memo to staff. “The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible. The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted.”
The company is planning to make the additional cuts “in the next few weeks,” Jassy wrote in the statement, which noted that the layoffs would affect employees including in Amazon Web Services, the live-streaming platform Twitch, and advertising.
“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” Jassy wrote.
The company is still deciding who exactly will be affected by the layoffs, and expects to finalize those details by late April, providing severance and other benefits to those affected, he wrote.
“We will, of course, support those we have to let go, and will provide packages that include a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support,” he said.
Jassy said that Amazon was making the cuts amid its evaluation of its operating plan, saying its own internal scrutiny prompted “re-prioritization decisions that sometimes led to role reductions,” or to employees being moved to other projects.
It also “led to new openings where we don’t have the right skills match from our existing team members,” Jassy wrote. The company is planning to conduct “limited hiring” in areas it is focusing on, he said.
The latest round of cuts at Amazon follows Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s own disclosure last week about more layoffs at his social media and tech company. Like Zuckerberg, who’d warned of a “new economic reality” in the foreseeable future, Jassy’s statement on Monday also pointed to “the uncertain economy” as a factor behind the cuts “to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.”
The new year has brought a series of layoff announcements from companies in tech and beyond, including Salesforce and Goldman Sachs. Salesforce indicated plans to cut about 10 percent of staff, while Goldman Sachs began laying off roughly 6.5 percent of its staff this year, Insider previously reported.
Some have also indicated plans to slow down hiring. Meta’s Zuckerberg said this month that the company is trying to achieve an “optimal ratio of engineers to other roles,” and that it has ramped up investments in artificial intelligence technology, amid the frenzy around OpenAI’s hit chatbot ChatGPT.
Read Jassy’s memo to Amazon employees on Monday:
As we’ve just concluded the second phase of our operating plan (“OP2”) this past week, I’m writing to share that we intend to eliminate about 9,000 more positions in the next few weeks—mostly in AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch. This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term.
Let me share some additional context.
As part of our annual planning process, leaders across the company work with their teams to decide what investments they want to make for the future, prioritizing what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses. For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount. This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, 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. The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole.
As our internal businesses evaluated what customers most care about, they made re-prioritization decisions that sometimes led to role reductions, sometimes led to moving people from one initiative to another, and sometimes led to new openings where we don’t have the right skills match from our existing team members. This initially led us to eliminate 18,000 positions (which we shared in January); and, as we completed the second phase of our planning this month, it led us to these additional 9,000 role reductions (though you will see limited hiring in some of our businesses in strategic areas where we’ve prioritized allocating more resources).
Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible. The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted. Once those decisions have been made (our goal is to have this complete by mid to late April), we will communicate with the impacted employees (or where applicable in Europe, with employee representative bodies). We will, of course, support those we have to let go, and will provide packages that include a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support.
If I go back to our tenet—being leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole—I believe the result of this year’s planning cycle is a plan that accomplishes this objective. I remain very optimistic about the future and the myriad of opportunities we have, both in our largest businesses, Stores and AWS, and our newer customer experiences and businesses in which we’re investing.
To those ultimately impacted by these reductions, I want to thank you for the work you have done on behalf of customers and the company. It’s never easy to say goodbye to our teammates, and you will be missed. To those who will continue with us, I look forward to partnering with you as we make life easier for customers every day and relentlessly inventing to do so.
Andy
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