Amazon to lay off more than 18,000 employees, CEO says

Amazon plans to cut more than 18,000 jobs as part of a workforce reduction disclosed in November, the online retailer said on Wednesday.

The layoffs will affect multiple divisions, but the majority relate to human resources and the company’s retail operations. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a blog post Wednesday that affected employees would be notified by January 18.

“Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so,” Jassy wrote in the post.

In November, when Jassy announced that the company had begun to cut its workforce, Amazon did not reveal how many jobs would be cut, but the general consensus was that around 10,000 positions would be cut. Jassy also said at the time that the cuts would continue until 2023.

Amazon was already the Goliath of American e-commerce before the pandemic. With the boom in online shopping, fueled first by shutdowns and then by stimulus funds, the company’s profits have soared for more than a year. It has gone on a hiring spree, doubling its ranks from just under 800,000 employees at the end of 2019 to more than 1.6 million at the end of 2021.

Then, in mid-2022, Amazon’s growth stalled and it posted its first loss in seven years in early 2022. By the time Jassy announced the job cuts in November, Amazon’s stock Amazon had lost about half its value in 11 years. month.

Jassy said in November that the downsizing process was complicated by the “difficult peak” the economy is in, as well as the fact that Amazon has been rapidly hiring employees in recent years. The company began to downsize in a number of areas, even before November’s round of layoffs and takeovers.

For the past few months, Jassy has halted testing on Amazon Scout, the company’s robotic home delivery initiative. It is also closed the Amazon Care telehealth and nursing service, as well as Fabric.com, a longtime online fabric retailer. Amazon imposed a hiring freeze for small teams in September, followed by a enterprise-wide freeze earlier this month.

The layoffs at Amazon reflect the turmoil facing the tech industry. Twitter, Microsoft, Meta and Google have also laid off thousands of workers in recent months.