Amazon’s largest layoffs : 30K employees at risk?

E-commerce giant Amazon is gearing up to handover pink slips to nearly 30,000 of its employees starting this Tuesday. This marks the largest job cuts in the company’s history as the number of employees to be affected has surpassed the previous highest of mass layoffs when 27,000 employees were terminated in 2022.

Though there is no official statement from Amazon on this development so far, reliable sources inside the company have confirmed that the job cuts beginning this week may affect a variety of divisions, including human resources, known as People Experience and Technology or PXT; operations, devices and services; and Amazon Web Services.

Amazon has a global workforce of close to 1.55 Million, but those who are now going to be eliminated will account for nearly 10% of the existing corporate employees in the company. According to US media, managers of affected teams were instructed to undergo communication training on Monday in preparation for staff notifications, which are expected to begin via email on Tuesday morning.

The exercise, which comes in the aftermath of the recent statement by CEO who warned layoffs due to Artificial Intelligence, is a part of company’s strategy to reverse the over hiring it done during the peak demand of the COVID pandemic five years ago when there was a huge surge in online shopping.

The company has been regularly terminating mid level employees across multiple divisions including devices, communications and podcasting. This time, the impact of layoffs will be spread over more divisions like HR and other sectors. CEO Andy Jassy is reportedly undertaking and exercise to reduce the number of managers after the introduction of an anonymous compliant line for claims of inefficiencies that received 1500 responses and more than 450 process changes.