Amazon Plans to Cut 10,000 Job Days After Twitter Cuts: Report

Tech giant Amazon plans to lay off 10,000 jobs in the coming days, adding to the bloodshed seen in the tech world after Twitter and Facebook parent Meta slashed its workforce.

The New York Times said in a reports On Monday that Amazon plans to lay off about 10,000 people in “corporate and technology jobs starting as soon as this week.” While the NYT said in its report that the number of people being laid off remains “fluid”, the 10,000 people who could be let go represent about 3 percent of Amazon’s corporate workforce and 1 percent of its more than 1.5 million global employees. of hourly workers.

“These cuts will focus on Amazon’s devices organization, including the Alexa voice assistant, and its retail and human resources divisions,” the report said.

Amazon’s layoffs come weeks after Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk cut the social network’s workforce in half and Meta announced it would lay off 13 percent of its workforce, or 11,000 employees.

The news of impending layoffs at Amazon came on a day when its founder Jeff Bezos told CNN that he plans to give away most of his $124 billion (roughly Rs. 10,04,100 crore) in charity during his lifetime.

Troubled times were beginning to emerge for Amazon as the NYT reported that from April to September, the tech giant cut nearly 80,000 jobs, mostly reducing its hourly workers due to massive layoffs.

“Amazon stopped hiring at a few small teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open roles in its core retail business. Two weeks ago, it halted hiring across the company, including its cloud computing division, for the next few months. That news came so suddenly that employers didn’t receive talking points from job seekers until a week later, according to a copy of the talking points seen by The New York Times,” it said.

The NYT report said “Amazon’s planned layoffs during the critical holiday shopping season — when the company tends to value stability — show how quickly a sour global economy has put pressure on businesses that have been overstaffing or underperforming for years.”

After seeing “the most profitable period in history” during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw a significant increase in consumer spending on the Internet, “Amazon’s growth fell to its lowest level in two decades, as the bullwhip of the pandemic erupted.” The report noted that during the pandemic years, as consumers flocked to shop online and companies to Amazon’s cloud computing services, the tech giant doubled its workforce in two years, and channeled its winnings into “expanding and trying to find the next big things.” However, as the world recovers from the pandemic and consumers retreat from online shopping, Amazon faced “higher costs from excessive investment decisions and rapid expansion, while changes in purchasing habits and higher sales inflation.” Amazon’s retail business, which combines its physical and online retail business and operations, is “under pressure” after a surge in demand and “sad growth” during the pandemic, the NYT said. sees uncertainty in consumers.

“We see that there are various factors that are troubling people’s wallets,” Brian Olsavsky, the chief financial officer, told investors last month, according to a NYT report. He said the company is not sure where the money will go, but “we are ready for different outcomes.” The NYT report added that in recent months, Amazon has closed or scaled back several of its initiatives, including Amazon Care, which provided basic and emergency health care after failing to find enough customers; Scout, a cool home delivery robot, which employs 400 people and Fabric.com, a subsidiary that sold sewing supplies for three decades.

For Amazon, Devices and Alexa have long been seen internally as a risk of being cut. The NYT report said that Alexa and related devices “came to the fore as Amazon raced to build the best voice assistant, which leaders thought could succeed cellphones as a key consumer interface.” From 2017 to 2018, Amazon doubled its workforce on Alexa and Echo devices to 10,000 developers. “At one point, any engineer who got a job in other roles at Amazon had to get Alexa,” he said.