Amazon is laying off 27,000 employees

Amazon has decided to cut another 9,000 jobs, on top of the already announced 18,000 redundancies. Jobs are now also being lost at gaming platform Twitch and even in its lucrative cloud division AWS.

Not done yet

The previous round of layoffs is barely digested, and now CEO Andy Jassy has already announced a new one. Amazon plans to cut another 9,000 jobs in the coming weeks, meaning that at least 27,000 jobs have already been cut this year. The reorganisation is the result of an annual workforce review, which was not quite completed by the first round of layoffs, Jassy claims.

“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago”, Jassy stated in a staff memo cited in AP News. Not all teams had finished their analyses last autumn, he says.

Doubling down too quickly

While the previous round of redundancies mostly affected staff in the retail division, both in the company’s e-commerce operations and physical shops, and innovative divisions such as the one for virtual assistant Alexa, now profitable operations are also being curtailed. These include cuts at cloud computing unit AWS, its growing advertising arm and gaming platform Twitch. The human resources department is already being decimated for the second time.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the workforce at Amazon doubled, but that now appears – as with other technology giants – to have been overbearing. Early last year, the company began pausing or cancelling expansion plans, but the cuts proved insufficient. Nevertheless, Jassy informs that Amazon will still hire new people in some strategic areas.