Report: Amazon to announce its largest round of layoffs in history, up to 30,000, affecting core departments such as cloud computing.

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On Monday local time, media reports citing informed sources revealed that Amazon plans to cut corporate positions across multiple key departments, including logistics, payments, video games, and cloud computing.

The layoffs could start as early as Tuesday, potentially affecting as many as 30,000 positions and involving nearly all business departments. Media reports state that Amazon is expected to notify affected employees via email on Tuesday morning. This would be the largest corporate layoff in Amazon's history.

Amazon's last large-scale round of layoffs was from late 2022 to early 2023. At that time, Amazon laid off more than 27,000 corporate employees. CEO Andy Jassy initiated a cost-cutting plan following rapid expansion during the pandemic. Subsequently, Amazon carried out a series of smaller, targeted layoffs in specific teams, affecting departments such as cloud computing, retail, communications, and devices.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.

This round of layoffs at Amazon is part of CEO Jassy’s cost-cutting initiative, which began during the Covid pandemic. Jassy is also pushing for streamlining management hierarchies, aiming to “de-layer and flatten the organization.”

Jassy stated in June this year that as the company increasingly uses artificial intelligence (AI) to perform tasks previously done by humans, Amazon’s workforce may shrink. This sparked panic among employees, with many seeking internal information about potential layoffs on anonymous forums, but the fragmented information made it difficult to judge the overall scale and scope.

Jassy wrote in an internal memo at the time: "In the future, we will need fewer people in some positions, but we will need more in other types of roles. Although it is difficult to predict the exact changes at this point, in the coming years, as we widely adopt AI in various departments to improve efficiency, we expect the total number of corporate employees to decrease."

According to informed sources, in internal meetings and planning documents over the past year, Jassy has repeatedly emphasized that the company should further promote automation and hand over more tasks to AI tools. He also said that despite multiple rounds of layoffs in the past three years, the rapid expansion during the pandemic still left some departments “bloated and inefficient.”

In addition, according to media reports earlier this year, Amazon required some corporate employees to relocate closer to management and teams. Employees were asked to move to places like Seattle, Arlington, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., with some even needing to move across states.

As of June 30, Amazon was the second-largest private employer in the U.S., with a global workforce of about 1.55 million, most of whom are warehouse workers. There are about 350,000 corporate employees.

According to the website Layoffs.fyi, this round of layoffs at Amazon will be the largest in the tech industry since 2020. As of this Monday, more than 200 tech companies have laid off about 98,000 employees so far this year. Other major tech companies have also recently announced job cuts:

Microsoft has laid off about 15,000 employees this year;

Meta cut about 600 jobs in its AI division last week;

Google cut more than 100 design-related positions in its cloud division earlier this month;

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stated in September that the company had cut 4,000 customer service staff, partly due to efficiency gains from generative AI applications.

Intel has laid off 22,000 employees this year.

Layoffs.fyi pointed out that 2023 was the worst year for tech industry layoffs, with nearly 1,200 tech companies eliminating about 260,000 positions in total, citing reasons including high inflation and rising interest rates.

Over the past year, industries such as technology, banking, automotive, and retail have noted that the rise of generative AI is or will be changing the human resources structure of companies.

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