Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to employees on Monday that the company will lay off 9,000 more workers in the coming weeks.
These layoffs are in addition to the previously announced layoffs, which began in November and continued into January. This round affected more than 18,000 employees, primarily in the retail, devices, recruiting, and human resources departments.
Amazon has decided to lay off more employees in order to reduce costs. It considered the economy as well as the “uncertainty that exists in the near future,” according to Jassy. The company has just completed the second phase of its annual budgeting process, known internally as “OP2.”
“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” Jassy said.
According to Jassy’s memo, the latest round will primarily affect Amazon’s cloud computing, human resources, advertising, and Twitch live-streaming businesses. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy stated that 400 people would be laid off as part of Amazon’s latest layoffs. Clancy blamed the economic downturn for Twitch’s failure to “keep pace with our expectations” regarding user and revenue growth.
After a hiring spree during the Covid pandemic, Amazon is undergoing its largest layoffs in company history. By the end of 2021, the company’s global workforce will have grown to more than 1.6 million, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.
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