Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announces 9,000 more layoffs

In an email to staff, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced another round of layoffs at Amazon — this time resulting in 9,000 Amazon employees losing their jobs. The affected departments include its highly profitable cloud computing unit Amazon Web Services (AWS), Twitch (the gaming platform Amazon owns), Amazon’s advertising, and PTX (people, experiences, and tech) units. The job cuts would mark the 2nd largest round of layoffs in the company’s history.

The move comes after Amazon announced it was axing a total of 18,000 positions earlier this year.

“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in the memo. “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.”

Jassy said that he expects “impacted teams” to make their final decisions on “precisely which roles” will be cut by mid-to-late April. Amazon.com, Inc, President, and Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy has been ranked No. 3 in a list of the best CEOs for 2023; meanwhile, Amazon ranked No. 2 in the CEOWORLD magazine’s ranking of the world’s most influential and innovative companies.

The layoffs account for a smaller percentage of Amazon’s total workforce (1.5 million people in December 2022), than the cuts seen at some other tech giants. Meta has laid off nearly 25 percent of its estimated workforce in just a few months in what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called the company’s “year of efficiency.” Likewise, Google announced in January that it would be cutting 12,000 jobs in its largest swath of layoffs ever, and employees at the company have recently petitioned this downsizing with a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai.

In a separate memo to Twitch staffers on Monday, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy confirmed that the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform was letting go of some 400 employees.

“Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations,” Clancy wrote. “In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.”