Amazon is cutting 9,000 jobs, CEO Andy Jassy has announced in a memo.
The new layoffs are in addition to a lengthy round of job cuts that spanned from November of last year to this January and impacted a total of 18,000 people.
It’s yet another deep cut to a rapidly consolidating industry, and just the latest sign that the tech business is no longer booming.
Amazon Reduces Web Services and Ad Divisions
The 9,000 jobs will be lost across four divisions of the sprawling ecommerce company, Jassy says: cloud tech division Amazon Web Services, gaming division Twitch, advertising, and human resources.
Previous cuts have already reduced the company’s more experimental divisions including staffers at the company’s physical retail stores, as well as trimming the general headcount.
Now, however, the cuts are hitting some of Amazon’s core business models. Amazon Web Services generated revenues of about $80 billion in 2022 alone, while the company reported $37.7 billion in advertising services worldwide during the same year.
Amazon Says It Is “Uncertain” About the Future
The reasoning behind the new job cuts is identical to the previous reasons given for the previous cuts. Early in January, he cited the “uncertain economy,” and his new blog post announcing the latest round of cuts this week again notes the “uncertain economy.”
Here’s how he phrases it:
“However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.”
He also notes that the company didn’t announce the two rounds of cuts at the same time because their analysts were still working on the issue… and he notes that they remain working on it. The apparent implication is that a third round of job cuts may be in the future.
The Tech Industry Layoffs
Tech companies have been on an employee-reduction spree for more than a few months, and the timing behind Amazon’s huge 9,000-job layoff means that it isn’t even the biggest one this month. Just last week, Facebook parent company Meta laid off 10,000 people, adding to the then-unprecedented 11,000 employees it had laid off in November.
Many others have joined since: We’ve tracked all the biggest tech layoffs across 2022 and this year, with big names including Salesforce, Twitter, Tesla, Dell, Shopify, Microsoft, Netflix, and others.
Interestingly, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used his own reoccurring phrase in the announcement for Meta’s last round of layoffs, repeating a version of the word “efficiency” about 20 times. CEOs like Zuckerberg and Jassy may not have exhaustive explanations for their company’s actions, but they do have memorable ones.
