Amazon continues to reduce the size of its workforce with CEO Andy Jassy announcing the departure of 9,000 more.
Amazon has announced that it would be cutting 9,000 jobs in the immediate future. CEO Andy Jassy made the announcement in a memo posted online last Monday.
The CEO would go on to state that uncertainty concerning the economy was what brought on the decision.
“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.”
Jassy explained to his staff.
This is not the first time Amazon has made such a decision this year. In January, it was decided that 18,000 employees would be laid off, bringing the total to 27,000.
Amongst those affected include Twitch, Amazon’s gaming service, and AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing platform. The company’s Advertising and Human Resources divisions will also incur job cuts as a result.
“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.” Jassy stated in the memo.
“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”. Jassy said in regard the date of the announcement.
Amazon has been making other cost-cutting decisions. Among these are plans to increase the number of warehouses. A 30-year-old subsidiary that sells fabrics has also been shut down.
Tech Crisis
Like other tech companies, Amazon increased the size of it’s workforce in response to the pandemic. However, the decrease of COVID also brought a lowered demand for Amazon household items.
Large companies such as Meta, Lyft, Salesforce, Spotify and Microsoft have also been making cuts to their respective workforces since the beginning of the year. They cited reasons similar to those made by Jassy.
Early this year, Salesforce confirmed that they would be laying off around 10% of their workforce.
Another tech giant, Microsoft, let go of 10,000 employees.
Lyft, on the other hand, has cut 680 jobs.
Mark Zuckerberg also announced that Meta would be letting go 10,000 people.
Spotify also laid off 600 staff, roughly 6% of the service’s workforce.
Amazon has yet to decide which employees to terminate. The teams affected by the cuts intend to have their choices finalised by April.
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