Amazon's Layoffs Are Worse Than Originally Reported As Company Plans To Cut 18k Positions

The Big Tech financial winter continues to roar, but at a much larger scale than what was initially predicted. Amazon is leading the layoff trend right after the holiday season. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has today announced between the initial workforce reduction plans that were announced in November last year and now, the company plans to "eliminate just over 18,000 roles."

The biggest chunk of the sacking is happening across the Amazon Store and the People Experience and Technology (PXT) departments. The rest of the marching orders have been communicated within the Devices and Books business, which covers some well-known brands and products such as Alexa, Kindle, Ring, Eero, and Fire TV. 

Discussing the business prospects of the year ahead, Jassy notes that it has "been more difficult given the uncertain economy and that we've hired rapidly over the last several years." Amazon is not the only company sharing that rhetoric. Meta gave a similar explanation as it announced plans to lay off thousands of employees, and so have several other companies in recent months. Elon Musk has tweeted that companies need to cut their spending, pause acquisitions, and focus on frugal efficiency as he aggressively cut down Twitter's workforce.

Talking about the future of the employees that will be handed the pink slip, Jassy adds that he and the S-Team, a team of top senior executives closely working with the CEO, are well aware of the impending difficulties. To help ease the transition away from Amazon, the impacted employees will be offered a severance payment, alongside support with finding new jobs in the industry and health insurance covering their job hunt phase.

Amazon wanted to make the layoff announcement after informing the people that were affected internally but were unable to do so because "one of our teammates leaked this information externally," according to Jassy. Amazon originally had plans to break the bad news to employees starting January 18. The successor to Jeff Bezos adds that the eliminations will allow Amazon to approach "a stronger cost structure."

Amazon's growth had a slowing momentum throughout 2022 and its losses also went up (per CNBC). On the bright side, Amazon's Q3 2022 results revealed a staggering $127.1 billion in revenue, a growth of 15 percent compared to the same quarter last year. More importantly, after two successive quarters of making a loss, Amazon posted $2.9 billion in net profit in the previous quarter.