With 9,000 New Cuts, Amazon Leads With Most Tech Layoffs

Amazon announced on Monday it will lay off another 9,000 employees.

This round of cuts will largely impact Amazon’s darling AWS team, which works on cloud-related initiatives, PXT (Experience and Technology solutions), the advertising department and streaming service site Twitch.

Layoffs will likely take place no later than late April, since teams are still deciding which employees will be let go.

This is Amazon’s third round of layoffs since we began tracking these numbers in 2021. The company reportedly laid off 10,000 in November and another 8,000 in January, according to the Crunchbase Layoffs Tracker.

CEO Andy Jassy said these layoff-taking measures are part of Amazon’s plan to be “lean” — reduce headcount, shift resources away from low-priority projects, and improve customer experience.

“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” Jassy wrote.

Strike three

Amazon’s most recent announcement means the company has laid off around 27,000 workers in less than a year. By comparison, Meta has laid off 21,000 employees in the same time period.

Both companies top the charts for cutting the largest number of tech workers since we began tracking layoffs.

It’s becoming obvious that even the big tech players are seemingly flying blind when it comes to layoff strategy

Previously we reported that large tech companies conducting several rounds of layoffs is pretty uncommon, given how multiple cuts can impact company culture and productivity.

But Amazon isn’t alone —Salesforce 1, Microsoft and Twitter have all announced several rounds of sweeping layoffs.

These companies grew like crazy in the golden age of 2021, hiring workers at unprecedented rates. It looks like there’s no consequence to these companies for hiring rapidly in the first place.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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