Amazon.
AMZN -0.79%
com Inc.’s layoffs will affect more than 17,000 employees, according to people familiar with the matter, the highest reduction tally revealed in the past year at a major technology company as the industry pares back amid economic uncertainty.
The Seattle-based company in November said that it was beginning layoffs among its corporate workforce, with cuts concentrated on its devices business, recruiting and retail operations. At the time, The Wall Street Journal reported the cuts would total about 10,000 people. Thousands of those cuts began last year.
The rest of the cuts will bring the total number of layoffs to more than 17,000 and will be made over the coming weeks, some of the people said. As of September, Amazon AMZN -0.79%
employed 1.5 million people, with a large percentage of them in its warehouses. The layoffs are concentrated in the company’s corporate ranks, some of the people said.
Amazon was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Covid-19 pandemic as customers flocked to online shopping. The rush to Amazon’s various businesses, from e-commerce to groceries and cloud computing, pushed forward years of growth for the company. To keep up with demand, Amazon doubled its logistics network and added hundreds of thousands of employees.
When demand started to wane with customers moving back to shopping in stores, Amazon initiated a broad cost-cutting review to pare back on units that were unprofitable, the Journal reported. In the spring and summer, the company made targeted cuts to bring down costs, closing physical stores and business units such as Amazon Care. Amazon later announced a companywide hiring freeze before deciding to let employees go.
Many tech companies have cut jobs as the economy sours. Amazon’s layoffs of more than 17,000 employees would represent the highest number of people let go by a tech company in the past few months, according to tallies released on Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks the events as they surface in media reports and company releases .
The trend has affected companies such as Amazon and others that have acknowledged that they grew too quickly in many cases. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
said it would cut more than 11,000 workers, or 13% of its staff, adding to layoffs at Lyft Inc.,
HP Inc.
and other tech companies. On Wednesday, Salesforce Inc.
said that it was laying off 10% of its workforce. Co-Chief Executive Marc Benioff said the business-software provider hired too many people as revenue surged earlier in the pandemic. “I take responsibility for that,” he said.
Write to Dana Mattioli at [email protected] and Jessica Toonkel at [email protected]
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Appeared in the January 5, 2023, print edition as ‘Amazon Layoffs To Exceed Initial Reports.’
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