Amazon is facing another wave of layoffs. After the company has already cut 18,000 jobs since November 2022, another 9,000 employees must now leave the company.
The Corona pandemic has brought Amazon a real boom. To cope with this, the US company has almost doubled its workforce. While Amazon still employed around 800,000 people in 2019, the number had already reached 1.6 million by 2021.
But precisely this boom has now come to an end. The US company has already had to cut around 18,000 jobs between November 2022 and January 2023. Now another 9,000 employees are to lose their jobs, as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy writes in a memo to the staff.
Layoffs at Amazon: What are the US company’s plans?
Amazon plans to cut around 9,000 more jobs in the coming weeks, according to the memo. The cuts will mainly hit the cloud division AWS, human resources, advertising and the livestreaming subsidiary Twitch.
This was a difficult decision, but we believe it is what is best for the company in the long run.
Jassy justifies the renewed wave of layoffs with the currently prevailing “uncertain economic situation”. There is “uncertainty in the near future” which has led the company to “streamline its workforce”.
Why isn’t Amazon laying off its workforce all at once?
Jassy’s memo also addresses why there is now another wave of layoffs and why the company did not cut all its jobs at once.
According to the memo, not all teams had progressed so far with their planning in the autumn. Now, however, after the second phase of the annual budgeting process, the company has received feedback on this from all areas.
Switch cannot meet expectations
While according to Jassy, it is not yet clear in all areas which jobs will be cut, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has already spoken about his area.
In a blog post, it says the streaming service will have to lay off just over 400 employees.
In order to sustain our business, we have made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce.
The reason is the “current macroeconomic environment”, which has affected Twitch’s business. The streaming service has fallen short of expectations in terms of user and revenue growth.
