Amazon on Tuesday announced it was planning to lay off more than 18,000 jobs amid efforts to cut costs.
Reed Saxon/AP
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Reed Saxon/AP
Amazon on Tuesday announced it was planning to lay off more than 18,000 jobs amid efforts to cut costs.
Reed Saxon/AP
Amazon is laying off 18,000 employees, the tech giant said on Wednesday, representing the largest number of job cuts at a tech company since the industry began to shrink last year. .
in one blog postAmazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that the layoffs were due to the uncertain economy and the company’s rapid hiring over the past few years.
The cuts will primarily affect the company’s enterprise workforce and will not affect hourly warehouse workers. In November, Amazon reported had planned to lay off about 10,000 employees but on Wednesday, Jassy pegged the company’s number of job layoffs higher than that, as he put it, “just over 18,000.”
Jassy attempted to strike an upbeat note in Wednesday’s blog post announcing the massive layoffs, writing: “Amazon has weathered difficult and uncertain economies in the past, and we will continue to do so.”
Although 18,000 is a large number of jobs, it is only slightly more than 1% 1.5 million workers Amazon employees in warehouses and corporate offices.
Last year, Amazon was the latest big Tech company to see growth slow due to the effects of the pandemic, as well as inflation at a 40-year high that has hit the business. sales number.
News of Amazon’s cuts comes the same day business software giant Salesforce announced its own round of layoffs, eliminating 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 jobs.
Salesforce co-CEO Mark Benioff attributes the scaling back to a process that has now been repeated in Silicon Valley: The outbreak of the pandemic caused the company to over-hire. And now that corporate spending has dropped, the focus is on cutting costs.
“As our revenue grew rapidly thanks to the pandemic, we hired too many people, leading to the economic downturn we are facing,” Benioff wrote in an article. Note to staff.
The owners of Facebook, Meta, as well as Twitter, Snap and Vimeo, have all announced major staff cuts in recent months, a notable reversal for an industry that has experienced massive growth. for over a decade.
For Amazon, the pandemic has been a huge boon to the company’s bottom line, with online sales soaring as people avoid in-store shopping and demand for cloud storage exploding with many businesses. Industry and government move operations online. And that has led Amazon to conduct massive hiring, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past few years.
The layoffs at Amazon are first report on Tuesday by The Wall Street Journall.
CEO Jassy, in his blog post, acknowledged that although the company’s hiring has gone too far, the company intends to help alleviate the damage to laid-off workers. .
“We are working to support those affected and are offering packages that include parting payments, transitional health insurance benefits and outside job referral assistance,” Jassy said.
