NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon plans to cut another 9,000 jobs in the next few weeks, CEO Andy Jassi said in a staff memo on Monday.
The job cuts will be the second-largest round of layoffs in the company’s history, adding to the 18,000 employees the company said it would lay off in January. However, the company’s workforce doubled during the pandemic during a hiring surge across virtually the entire tech sector.
In a memo, Yassi said the second phase of the company’s annual planning process, which determined which areas of the business needed to cut costs, ended this month and resulted in additional job cuts. He said that Amazon will still be hiring in some strategic areas.
Some may ask why we didn’t announce these cutbacks that we announced a couple of months ago. The short answer is that not all teams completed their analysis in late fall; and instead of rushing through these assessments without due diligence, we decided to share these decisions as we made them so that people get informed as soon as possible,” said Yassi.
This time, the job cuts will affect the company’s profitable areas, including its AWS cloud computing division and its growing advertising business. Twitch, the gaming platform owned by Amazon, will also face layoffs, as will the Amazon PXT organizations that handle human resources and other functions.
Previous layoffs have also affected PXT, the company’s store division that covers its e-commerce business, as well as the company’s brick-and-mortar stores like Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, and other departments like the one that runs Alex’s virtual assistant.
Amazon is also cutting costs in other areas. Earlier this month, the company said it would halt construction on its northern Virginia headquarters building, though the first phase of that project will open in June this year and employ 8,000 employees.
Like other tech companies, including Facebook parent Meta and Google parent Alphabet, Amazon ramped up recruitment during the pandemic to meet demand from Americans who have been increasingly shopping online to protect themselves from the virus. Its workforce, which includes warehouse workers as well as corporate positions, has doubled to over 1.6 million people in about two years. But demand has slowed as the effects of the pandemic have eased, and last year the company began to pause or cancel its warehouse expansion plans to avoid wasting unnecessary cash.
As fears of a possible recession began to grow, he also began to make other adjustments in some areas. Over the past few months, it has shut down a subsidiary that has been selling fabrics for nearly 30 years and closed its Amazon Care hybrid virtual home care service, among other cost-cutting moves.
