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Amazon The company is preparing to announce significant layoffs starting Tuesday, CNBC reported.
The layoffs represent the largest workforce reduction in Amazon’s history and span nearly every business, said a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the details are confidential.
Amazon plans to begin notifying employees of the layoffs via email starting Tuesday morning, the person said.
According to Reuters, which first reported the news, the company plans to lay off up to 30,000 employees overall.
Amazon declined to comment.
Amazon is the second largest private employer in the United States, with more than 1.54 million employees worldwide as of the end of the second quarter. This figure is primarily made up of warehouse employees. The company has approximately 350,000 employees.
The planned layoffs would be the largest layoffs across the technology industry since at least 2020, according to Layoffs.fyi. As of Monday, more than 200 tech companies had laid off about 98,000 employees since the start of the year, according to the site, which tracks layoffs in the tech sector.
microsoft Approximately 15,000 people have been laid off so far this year. meta Last week, about 600 jobs were cut within the company’s artificial intelligence division. google Earlier this month, we cut more than 100 design-related roles in our cloud division. sales force CEO Marc Benioff said in September that the company was laying off 4,000 customer support staff, citing increased adoption of AI as the catalyst for the layoffs. intel‘s job cuts this year total 22,000, the highest of any listed by Layoffs.fyi.
The sharpest year of layoffs in the technology industry was in 2023 as the industry factored in soaring inflation and rising interest rates. According to the site, nearly 1,200 tech companies have cut more than 260,000 jobs.
Over the past year, companies across industries such as tech, banking, automotive, and retail have also pointed to the rise of generative AI as a factor that could or has already changed the size of their workforces.
Amazon has been implementing rolling layoffs across the company starting in 2022, resulting in more than 27,000 employees being let go. Staff reductions continue this year, albeit on a smaller scale. Amazon’s cloud, stores, communications and devices divisions have been hit by layoffs in recent months.
The job cuts are part of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s broader cost-cutting campaign that began during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr. Jassy also moved to simplify Amazon’s corporate structure by reducing the number of managers to “remove hierarchies and flatten the organization.”
Jassy said in June that Amazon’s rollout of generative AI could result in further shrinkage of its workforce, telling employees that the company will “need to have fewer people doing some of the jobs that are currently being done and more people doing other types of work.”
“While it is difficult to know exactly where the impact of this will be over time, we expect this to result in reductions in our workforce across the company in the coming years,” Jassy said in a June memo to employees.
Featured: Report: Amazon aims to cut up to 30,000 corporate jobs starting Tuesday
