Tech layoffs: Amazon cuts 27,000 jobs in 2023

Amazon plans to lay off 9,000 additional employees in the next few weeks, making it the second largest round of layoffs in the company’s history.

The recent job cuts would add to the 18,000 employees the tech giant said it would lay off in January, taking the total number of job cuts in 2023 to 27,000.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the layoffs in a memo to staff. He said the additional job cuts were part of the second phase of the company’s annual planning process. However, he said Amazon will still hire in some strategic areas.

“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible,” Jassy said.

The job cuts will hit profitable areas for the company including its cloud computing unit AWS and Twitch, the gaming platform Amazon owns. Twitch has announced that it will lay off 400 employees.

The layoffs indicate the reverse of the hiring spree that surged during the pandemic as millions of people moved their lives online. It was not just Amazon. Other tech companies, including Meta and Alphabet, followed the same trend, ramped up hiring during the pandemic to meet the demand, and are now reducing their workforce.

Big Tech Layoffs

Many tech companies have announced tens of thousands of job cuts in the past few months amid slowing growth and fears of a recession. Almost 800 firms have sliced at least 473,000 jobs since October 2022, according to a Bloomberg report.

According to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi there were 84,714 tech layoffs in January and 36,541 in February this year. Layoffs continued in March 2023 and there were 31,603 reported layoffs as of March 23.

Amazon has slashed 27,000 jobs. Facebook parent company Meta has announced to cut 21,000 roles since last November. Tech giants Microsoft and Google parent company Alphabet have announced that they will be laying off over 22,000 employees collectively.