Amazon (AMZN) is laying off an additional 9,000 workers months after it cut 18,000 jobs. The announcement comes as the company continues to grapple with slowing online sales following its rapid expansion during COVID.
In a letter to employees, CEO Andy Jassy said that the new layoffs will mainly hit the company’s AWS cloud services, its PXT division, advertising, and its Twitch online game streaming platform.
“Given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,” Jassy wrote in the note.
“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole.”
According to Jassy, Amazon didn’t announce the 9,000 cuts alongside the original 18,000 in January, because the company hadn’t completed its analysis of its various departments yet, but didn’t want to “rush through those assessments.”
Amazon had a difficult 2022, as consumers began to move on from their COVID-era habits and started going out into the world again and shopping in person. That left the company, which expanded its headcount by a whopping 93.5% from Q4 2019 through Q3 2022, with too many employees on hand.
In its Q4 earnings announcement, Amazon reported a full year loss of net loss of $2.7 billion. More worrisome, however, is that Amazon missed Wall Street’s Q4 expectations for its AWS business, reporting sales of $21.3 billion versus an expected $21.76 billion.
Amazon isn’t the only tech giant that’s had to double down on layoffs. Just last week, Meta (META) announced it will eliminate 10,000 jobs by the end of the year and close out 5,000 open positions it hasn’t hired for yet. The social media titan previously laid off some 11,000 workers in Nov. 2022.
Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT), meanwhile, laid off 10,000 and 12,000, respectively at the start of 2023 as part of their own efforts to reign in spending.
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