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After decades of near-constant expansion, Amazon on Tuesday began laying off corporate workers, becoming the latest tech giant to cut its workforce in recent weeks.
Amazon is expected to cut about 10,000 jobs, about 3 percent of its corporate workforce. The company began communicating the layoffs to employees on Tuesday afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters.
Amazon plans to cut thousands of corporate workers
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Within hours of the layoffs starting, employees began posting on LinkedIn and the anonymous job app Blind to say they had been cut and were looking for new jobs.
The cuts will mainly affect areas such as retail, human resources and devices. Earlier this month, Amazon announced a broad hiring freeze among its white-collar workforce that would last at least “for the next few months.”
The cuts are expected to be the e-commerce giant’s biggest round of layoffs in its history, marking a major turnaround for the company that has hired aggressively over the past decade.
Amazon is expected to continue hiring at its warehouses, where it is adding staff to support its busy holiday season.
In recent weeks, Twitter, Salesforce, Facebook parent Meta, and other tech companies have announced major layoffs or hiring freezes, following months of warning signs such as tech startups struggling to raise money capital
Dan Ives, a financial analyst at Wedbush Securities, told The Washington Post on Monday that the layoffs may signal an impending recession. Tech companies, he said, “got significantly inflated and are not built for a softer economy like we’re seeing.”
Meta cut 11,000 jobs, or 13 percent of its workforce, last week. Ride-hailing service Lyft also lost 13 percent of its staff. Fintech Stripe and real estate marketplace Zillow have also announced layoffs since October.
Earlier this month, Twitter CEO Elon Musk cut half of his company’s workforce shortly after acquiring the social network.
Twitter cuts staff as Musk era ushers in
The mass layoffs represent a sharp reversal for Amazon, which has been expanding for much of its history. At the end of September, it employed more than 1.5 million workers, 5% more than the previous year. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
Amazon saw huge growth during the coronavirus crisis as people spent more time at home and did more and more of their shopping online. In May, the company acknowledged that it had staffed its warehouses too quickly to keep pace with demand, which was then cooling.
Also, in the face of high inflation and increasingly budget-conscious consumers, Amazon issued a disappointing forecast for the holiday season, normally its strongest time of year, which caused its shares last month. Amazon shares have fallen nearly 39 percent since the start of the year, though it still has a market cap above $1 trillion.
Mandy Dean, 39, was a contractor in Chicago for Amazon Luna, the company’s cloud gaming platform. The company let his contract expire in September, though he said he was interviewing to go full-time.
It wasn’t a complete surprise, as Dean said he saw the signs in August as the software engineer openings he was tasked with filling were reduced.
“It was a bad time for it all to happen,” Dean said. “I really enjoyed working for Amazon. I liked the culture, the people I worked with, the job itself. It was a difficult situation, but there was nothing I could do about it.”