Report: Amazon will announce its largest layoffs in history, affecting up to 30,000 employees, involving core departments such as cloud computing

On Monday local time, media reports citing informed sources revealed that Amazon plans to cut corporate positions in several key departments, including logistics, payments, video games, and cloud computing.

The layoffs could start as early as Tuesday, potentially affecting up to 30,000 positions across nearly all business departments. Media reports indicate that Amazon is expected to notify affected employees via email on Tuesday morning. This scale of layoffs would be the largest corporate employee reduction in Amazon's history.

The last major layoffs at Amazon occurred from late 2022 to early 2023, during which the company cut more than 27,000 corporate employees. CEO Andy Jassy initiated the cost-cutting plan following the company's rapid expansion during the pandemic. Since then, Amazon has conducted smaller layoffs targeting specific teams, affecting the cloud computing, retail, communications, and devices departments.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on this matter.

The current layoffs are part of CEO Jassy's cost-cutting plan, which began during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jassy has also pushed for the company to streamline management levels, aiming for "de-layering and flattening the organizational structure."

In June of this year, Jassy stated that as the company increasingly uses artificial intelligence (AI) to perform tasks previously done by humans, Amazon's workforce may shrink. This statement caused panic among employees, many of whom sought internal information about potential layoffs on anonymous forums, but due to scattered information, it was difficult to gauge the overall scale and scope of the layoffs.

In an internal memo at that time, Jassy wrote: "In the future, we will need fewer people in certain roles, but more people in other types of roles. While it is currently difficult to predict the final changes accurately, we expect the overall corporate workforce to decrease in the coming years as we widely use AI across various departments to improve efficiency."

According to informed sources, Jassy has repeatedly emphasized in internal meetings and planning documents over the past year that the company should further promote automation and delegate more work to AI tools. He also noted that despite multiple rounds of layoffs over the past three years, the rapid expansion during the pandemic has left some departments "bloated and inefficient."

Additionally, media reports earlier this year indicated that Amazon required some corporate employees to relocate to offices closer to management and teams. Employees were asked to move to locations such as Seattle, Arlington, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., with some even needing to relocate across state lines.

As of June 30, Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the United States, with a total global workforce of approximately 1.55 million, the majority of whom are warehouse workers. The corporate workforce is about 350,000.

According to data from Layoffs.fyi, Amazon's current layoffs will be the largest in the tech industry since 2020. As of this Monday, over 200 tech companies have laid off approximately 98,000 employees since the beginning of the year. Other major tech companies have also recently announced job cuts:

Microsoft has laid off about 15,000 employees this year; Meta laid off about 600 people in its artificial intelligence department last week;

Google cut more than 100 design-related positions in its cloud department earlier this month;

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stated in September that the company has laid off 4,000 customer service personnel, one reason being that the application of generative AI has improved efficiency.

Intel has laid off 22,000 people this year.

Layoffs.fyi points out that 2023 is the worst year for layoffs in the tech industry, with nearly 1,200 tech companies cutting about 260,000 jobs, due to high inflation and rising interest rates.

Over the past year, multiple industries, including technology, banking, automotive, and retail, have indicated that the rise of generative artificial intelligence is changing or will soon change the workforce structure of companies