Amazon to lay off an additional 9,000 employees

Amazon will lay off an additional 9,000 employees, CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a staff memo on Monday.

The latest cuts come after the tech giant let go of 18,000 workers between November and January.

The new string of layoffs will primarily impact Amazon’s cloud computing, human resources, advertising, and Twitch live-streaming businesses, the memo said.

Jassy said that while Amazon had expanded significantly in recent years, “the uncertain economy...and the uncertainty that exists in the near future” meant the company must be proactive about its costs.

“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.

He added that these 9,000 positions were not included in the earlier round of layoffs as analysis on these teams had not then been completed.

The layoffs are expected to be finalized by mid to late April, Jassy said.

Like Amazon, other big tech companies have been cutting down on costs in significant layoffs after a volatile 2022. According to data tracked by Layoffs.fyi, more than 160,000 employees were fired last year across more than 1,000 tech companies, and nearly 140,000 employees were laid off so far this year at companies like Microsoft and Google’s parent firm Alphabet.

Last week Meta announced an additional 10,000 job cuts after reducing its staff size by about 13% in 2022.