Amazon to lay off 9,000 — just weeks after firing 18,000: ‘This is best for the company’

Amazon will shed some 9,000 jobs just weeks after it laid off around 18,000 employees, the Seattle-based e-commerce giant told its workers Monday.

Andy Jassy, the CEO of the $1 trillion firm, circulated a memo announcing the latest layoffs will impact 3% of its 282,000-strong corporate workforce.

“This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term,” Jassy wrote in the memo.

Jassy told staffers that most of the cuts will affect positions in the company’s cloud computing division Amazon Web Services, its People experience and Technology unit (PXT), its advertising department, and its Twitch live video streaming division.

Amazon joins other tech giants including Google, Meta, Twitter, and Microsoft that have laid off tens of thousands of employees in recent months due to falling revenue and macroeconomic headwinds spurred by soaring inflation and high interest rates.

Jassy said the company had added substantial amount of staff in the past few years, but the uncertain economy has forced it to choose cost and headcount cuts.

“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 said.

The culling comes just weeks after the company announced it was pausing construction on its much-touted second headquarters in Virginia.

Shares of Amazon fell by more than 1.5% on Monday. In the last year, Amazon’s stock has lost 40% of its value.

Jassy said the layoffs were designed with the intention of making the company “leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole.” 

The Amazon chief said the firm “evaluated what customers most care about” and as a result “made re-prioritization decisions that sometimes led to role reductions…”

“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago,” Jassy wrote.

“The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall…”

Jassy said that management teams at Amazon did their “appropriate diligence” in determining which roles to cut.

“To those ultimately impacted by these reductions, I want to thank you for the work you have done on behalf of customers and the company,” he wrote.

“It’s never easy to say goodbye to our teammates, and you will be missed.”

This past fall, Amazon announced it was cutting 6% of its 300,000-strong corporate workforce — the largest in its nearly 30-year-history.

In its most recent earnings report, the company said its net income decreased by some $300 million in the fourth quarter of last year.

Overall, Amazon reported a net loss of $2.7 billion in 2022. The company was weighed down by its struggling Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh grocery stores.