CNBC has reported that Amazon is set to announce massive layoffs, which are expected to begin on Tuesday.
According to a person familiar with the matter, the job cuts will be the largest the company has ever made to its corporate workforce, covering nearly all business divisions.
An Individual said that Amazon is supposed to start notifying workers of the layoffs through email on Tuesday morning.
According to Reuters, which was the first to report the news, the company intends to lay off up to 30,000 employees in its corporate workforce. Therefore, Amazon refused to comment on this matter.
Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the country, which has over 1.54 million employees based around the world as of the end of the second quarter.
The warehouse workforce constitutes the majority of that figure. It employs approximately 350,000 corporate workers.
According to the site that tracks the number of job cuts in the tech firms, over 200 tech companies have laid off around 98,000 workers since the beginning of the year, as of Monday.
Microsoft has already downsized approximately 15,000 employees this year, and Meta has laid off its artificial intelligence team by around 600 employees last week.
Google also laid off over 100 design-related positions in its cloud division earlier this month, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced in September that the company laid off 4,000 customer support workers, attributing its growing use of AI as one of the factors that helped the company make the decision.
Intel has laid off 22,000 workers this year, which is the highest number of workers recorded on Layoffs.
The most drastic boom year in terms of job losses in technology was 2023, when the sector faced soaring inflation and interest rate increases.
The site reported that close to 1,200 tech firms had laid off more than 260,000 employees were removed from their position.
The emergence of generative AI has also been cited by companies supporting the past year in the tech, banking, auto, and retail sectors as an influence that is likely to or already transforming the size of their workforces.
Amazon has been making rolling layoffs within the company, and over 27,000 employees have been laid off as a result since 2022. The cuts in jobs have proceeded in the current year on a smaller scale.
Recent months have been marked by layoffs in Amazon’s cloud, stores, communications, and devices divisions.
These layoffs fall under a larger cost-cutting initiative launched by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, which started during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jassy has also taken steps to streamline Amazon’s corporate structure by reducing the number of managers to “remove layers and flatten organizations.”
Jassy indicated in July that the number of employees at Amazon might continue to decrease due to its adoption of generative AI, informing employees that the company “will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”
Jassy stated in the June memo to staff that “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”
