Amazon plans to cut another 9,000 jobs, including at AWS and Twitch

Amazon.com is laying off an additional 9,000 employees, adding to what is already the largest layoff in the company’s history.

Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy announced the cuts internally on Monday, saying they would take place over the next several weeks and would primarily affect Amazon Web Services, human resources, advertising and Twitch’s live streaming service groups.

The e-commerce giant mainly laid off company employees after a hiring frenzy during the pandemic left Amazon overstaffed. The company completed a series of layoffs totaling about 18,000 employees last month. These layoffs hit Amazon’s recruiting and staffing teams, the sprawling retail group, and the equipment teams the hardest.

The cuts come less than a week after Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. announced it would lay off an additional 10,000 workers and close about 5,000 additional job openings in its own second major round of layoffs. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees at a recent internal meeting that the economic climate of layoffs and restructuring could last “many years.”

Amazon employed 1.54 million people worldwide at the end of December. The vast majority of these workers are hourly wage earners who pack and ship products in warehouses. Before the start of the first round of layoffs in November, the company employed about 350,000 people.

Jassy said the latest cuts came after crews completed another phase of the company’s annual planning process. He said most of Amazon’s businesses have expanded significantly in recent years.

“However, given the uncertain economy we live in and the uncertainty that exists for the foreseeable future, we have decided to streamline our costs and workforce,” he said in his memo, which was later published on Amazon’s corporate blog .is. “The overarching principle of our annual planning this year has been to be leaner and do it in a way that allows us to continue to invest heavily in the most important long-term customer experiences that we believe will change the lives of customers and Determine Amazon. can significantly improve an entire form. “