Amazon has just announced it plans to lay off 9,000 more of its employees. Those numbers are in addition to the 18,000 workers that the online shopping and tech site said it would cut back in January 2023.
In a memo to workers that was posted on Amazon"s blog, CEO Andy Jassy stated that the cuts would happen sometime in the next few weeks, and would mostly affect employees in its AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch divisions. The cuts come as the company has completed what Jassy called the second phase of Amazon"s operating plan, or “OP2." He added:
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. 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.
Even with these new cuts, Jassy stated that he was "very optimistic about the future and the myriad of opportunities we have" at Amazon.
Last week, Meta announced its own second round of job cuts, as it will eliminate 10,000 more jobs by the end of 2023. The tech industry continues to be hit with big labor cuts, as companies like Microsoft, Google, Dell, Spotify, Zoom, PayPal, and many more have revealed layoffs in the thousands. So far, Apple is the only big tech company that has not revealed mass job cuts, although it has reduced its hiring and has delayed employee bonuses.
Update: 2:20 PM Eastern time: A post on the official Twitch blog confirms that the gaming-themed streamer service owned by Amazon will let go of 400 of its employees.