On March 20th, 2023, Monday, Amazon confirmed its second round of mass layoff across the departments by the end of April, and this time the firings will affect over 9,000 more employees. They said that the employees belonging to the departments including AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch will get affected by this decision. The global e-commerce giant has already laid off 18,000 employees in January this year as a part of cost-cutting and its annual planning process at top tech companies worldwide.

The new layoffs, which amount to less than 3 percent of its corporate workforce, will target several workers in some of Amazon’s most profitable divisions, which had previously been spared, including Amazon’s Cloud computing business as well as advertising operations. According to the financial analysts and filings, the two segments of the business are way higher-margin operations than Amazon’s core retail business. 

CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy said that the second phase of the company’s annual planning process has been completed this month which led to additional job cuts. He further added that Amazon will still hire employees in some strategic areas. He wrote, “The overriding tenet of our yearly planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that allows us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customer’s lives and Amazon as a whole.”

For more than a year, Andy Jassy has been pursuing cost-cutting at Amazon. During the pandemic, the company rapidly added employees and put priority on some projects that lacked obvious ways to become profitable. He has also pulled back on the expansion of the company’s warehouse operations and paused work on the biggest phase of Amazon’s planned second headquarters near Washington, D.C. According to a person familiar with its workforce, Amazon had about 380,000 corporate employees at the end of 2022. Most of Amazon’s warehouse operations have roughly 1.5 million employees, who are basically hourly workers.  

The company froze hiring last fall and by November had plans to lay off about 10,000 more employees and a target to expand it to 18,000 employees in January last year. At Amazon, the initial layoffs affected the employees who were working on the Alexa voice assistant and devices, then they spread to other divisions, including the working of teams on plans for automated stores, drones as well as the company’s broader consumer retail business. The one who was the most affected were the human resources employees-recruiters in particular. Amazon reported nearly with no profit, driven in part by unexpected weakness in its cloud computing business.