The Seattle company boomed during the early days of the pandemic, when consumers leaned into online ordering. But growth has waned for Amazon and fellow tech giants Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which have all have announced massive layoffs in the past several months. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
It’s a significant reversal for the industry, which some had perceived as “recession-proof.” But others say the companies grew too big, too fast and needed to rein in spending. The layoffs have also hit start-ups and smaller firms, and funding has been less accessible as the sector struggles.
The tech world was dealt another blow this month when its namesake financial institution, Silicon Valley Bank, collapsed and was taken over by regulators after it said it would need to sell shares to raise money and panicked customers caused a bank run.
Amazon said this round of cuts would take place in some of its biggest moneymaking businesses, including its cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services and its advertising unit, as well as in the video game streaming business Twitch and other corporate divisions.
Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear said he would step down as CEO late last week, passing the reins to company president Dan Clancy.
Most of Amazon’s 1.5 million employees work in its warehouses, but the company had more than 330,000 corporate and tech employees around the world before it started cutting tens of thousands of white-collar workers.
Amazon has curtailed its growth in other areas as well — earlier this month, the company announced it was pausing construction on its much anticipated second headquarters in Arlington, Va.; it has also closed, canceled, or delayed dozens of other development projects around the country.
The company recently introduced a mandatory return to office, which frustrated thousands of employees who joined an internal Slack group to protest the decision.
CEO Andy Jassy said the latest cuts were determined after divisions decided on their priorities and outlined investments for the next year in an annual planning process.
“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago,” he wrote in an announcement Monday. “The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.”
Teams are still making decisions about which exact roles will be cut, he wrote, and laid-off workers will be notified after that process finishes in mid- or late April.
Caroline O’Donovan contributed to this report.
