E-commerce giant Amazon has announced this week it will not be laying off 10,000 staff as first reported in November, but 18,000.
The cuts represent an 80 per cent increase on the forecast reported in the Wall Street Journal, amounting to about 1.2% of its worldwide workforce of around 1.5 million.
In a statement shared with Amazon employees this week, Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon, confirmed the losses; he said: "Today, I wanted to share the outcome of these further reviews, which is the difficult decision to eliminate additional roles. Between the reductions we made in November and the ones we’re sharing today, we plan to eliminate just over 18,000 roles."
The cuts will affect around 5% of the corporate workforce. About what divisions would be most affected, Jassy stated:
"Several teams are impacted; however, most role eliminations are in our Amazon Stores and PXT organisations."
As shopper demand appears to have slowed while inflation rates have climbed steadily higher, Amazon is not the only tech firm to cut costs across divisions. Several big tech groups, including Salesforce, Meta and Microsoft, are tightening their belts and deepening their cost focus, reversing the hiring hike experienced during the pandemic. In turn, this aims to keep investors happy by steadying share prices.
Vimeo announced more this week after making two redundancies in six months. CEO Anjali Sud announced the video marketing platform is releasing 11 per cent of its estimated 1,400 staff from their contracts.
Meta cut 11,000 jobs in November, the first mass layoffs in its history, amounting to about 13 per cent of its 87,000-s, strong workforce; with the metaverse, division taking less of a hit the job losses will come mainly from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Back in October, Microsoft also laid off 1,000 jobs due to ‘structural changes’, according to Office Today. In 2022, Twitter released 3,750 employees, while Snap (Snapchat) let go of 1,300 staff.
