The layoffs go beyond the 27,000 jobs Amazon cut back in 2022.
Amazon Web Services parent Amazon.com is reportedly looking to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs, covering almost 10 percent of its 350,000 corporate employees, with emails to affected employees set to go out Tuesday.
The cuts should hit every business within Amazon, including human resources, devices and services and operations, according to CNBC and Reuters reports Monday. The layoffs go beyond the 27,000 jobs Amazon cut back in 2022, regarded at the time as one of the Seattle-based cloud and artificial intelligence products vendor’s biggest layoff events in its history. Amazon also let go of 18,000 employees in 2023.
Amazon distinguishes corporate employees from its total headcount across warehouses and other parts of its portfolio, with a total workforce of about 1.6 million people.
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Amazon Layoffs
CRN has reached out to Amazon for comment.
The layoff reports come as Amazon gets ready to reveal on Thursday earnings for its third fiscal quarter and a week after the vendor navigated a 15-hour outage that affected a variety of websites and applications. AWS’ 17.5 percent growth year on year was below the 39 percent posted by rival Microsoft Azure and the 32 percent Google Cloud reported in the vendors’ most recent quarterly earnings.
The two news outlets said that Amazon has been making incremental cuts to multiple divisions over the past two years, letting people go from devices, communications, podcasting and other areas. Fortune reported on Oct. 14 that Amazon was looking to cut as much as 15 percent of its HR staff. It was not immediately clear if those cuts are separate from the 30,000 corporate jobs layoffs that the company is reportedly looking to make.
Even roles in Amazon’s AWS cloud division–regarded as the No. 1 cloud provider on the market, ahead of Microsoft’s Azure–haven’t been spared by the vendor’s cost-cutting measures this year, with the company confirming in July the elimination of roles inside AWS.
The layoffs come as technology vendors and other businesses explore whether artificial intelligence can take the place of human workers, not to mention uncertainty over global tariffs, wars and other macroeconomic factors.
Other vendors to conduct layoffs this year include Jamf, Kaseya, Google, Dell Technologies and Microsoft.
