Amazon has announced yet another substantial round of layoffs, as the internet giant today revealed that a further 9,000 people are set to lose their jobs.
In a memo published by CEO Andy Jassy this morning, the company said that the cuts will impact those in its AWS cloud unit, Twitch gaming division, advertising, and PXT (experience and technology solutions) arm.
The news comes just a couple of months after Amazon had revealed 18,000 layoffs, the majority of which were set to come from its PXT and Amazon Stores businesses. That news in itself was an extension on a previous round of layoffs that was supposed to hit around 10,000 people, so today’s reveal shines a light on how Amazon has gone about its headcount reduction efforts — it has been staggered, to say the least.
Indeed, Jassy addressed this very point in today’s memo, noting that rather than rushing to finish its assessments in order to announce all the redundancies in one fell swoop, they elected to take their time and let people know once each team had more or less completed their analysis. Moreover, Jassy said that they still haven’t concluded the full ins and outs of their cutbacks in terms of each role that will disappear.
It is worth noting that Amazon is one of the world’s largest employers, with some 1.5 million employees worldwide, roughly seven-times that of Google’s parent Alphabet which laid off some 12,000 workers less than two months ago.
“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago,” Jassy wrote. “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. The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted. Once those decisions have been made (our goal is to have this complete by mid to late April), we will communicate with the impacted employees (or where applicable in Europe, with employee representative bodies).”
On the surface, one of the biggest surprises here is that Amazon’s perennial cash cow AWS has been hit by the layoffs. But while AWS remains in relatively rude health, its growth trajectory of late has not been as precipitous as it has been in years gone by, which is reflective of a broader slowdown in cloud infrastructure spending. Put simply, companies are looking to cut costs due to the economic climate, which translates into fewer dollars spent on things like cloud computing.
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Amazon confirms another round of layoffs, impacting 9,000 people in AWS, Twitch and other units by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch
