Amazon job cuts will begin on Tuesday with the company preparing to remove as many as thirty thousand corporate positions, according to three people familiar with the plan. The move targets nearly ten percent of Amazon’s corporate workforce as the company responds to heavy hiring during the pandemic and ongoing cost pressure.
It would be Amazon’s largest round of layoffs since late 2022, when more than twenty seven thousand jobs were removed across multiple business units.
The layoffs will affect a range of teams, including human resources, operations, devices and services, and Amazon Web Services. Managers were asked on Monday to complete training on how to inform employees once notices begin rolling out through email on Tuesday morning, the sources said.
Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy has been focused on reducing layers of bureaucracy and restructuring teams to work more efficiently. He created an internal complaint channel earlier this year that encouraged employees to report slow or wasteful processes. Jassy said that effort prompted more than fourteen hundred suggestions and hundreds of changes inside the company.
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In June, Jassy warned that newer tech inside Amazon that supports repetitive tasks could allow the company to rely on fewer corporate workers.
Sky Canaves, an analyst at eMarketer, told Reuters that the company appears to be seeing enough productivity gains to support workforce reductions while seeking returns on long term spending to expand new tech infrastructure.
The final size of the layoff group could still shift depending on quarterly performance and planning for 2025. Fortune earlier reported that the human resources division may see cuts of around fifteen percent.
Amazon has asked employees to return to the office five days a week. Two sources said this policy has not pushed as many people to resign as leadership expected. According to the people familiar with the matter, some employees who did not show up daily because they live far from offices or for other personal reasons have been informed they effectively quit their jobs and will leave without severance benefits.
Amazon Web Services remains the company’s most profitable business. It brought in more than thirty billion dollars in second quarter revenue, but growth lagged behind Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Estimates for the third quarter suggest AWS maintained growth, though slightly lower than the same period last year. The unit also dealt with a lengthy outage last week that briefly disrupted popular services like Snapchat and Venmo.
Even with corporate reductions ahead, Amazon expects another strong holiday shopping period. It plans to hire two hundred fifty thousand seasonal workers, matching holiday staffing levels from the past two years.