The CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, revealed in a statement on Monday morning that the firm will lay off another set of 9,000 workers in the coming weeks. This will be the third significant round of layoffs since November, and it follows a significant job loss at Facebook and Instagram’s parent company just last week. A further 9,000 Amazon employees will be let go globally as the e-commerce behemoth intensifies its cost-cutting tactics.
CEO Andy Jassy informed the company’s staff of the news in a memo, noting that employees in the Amazon Web Services, human resources, advertising, and Twitch businesses will be most impacted by the change, with the layoffs occurring over a few weeks.
That comes on the heels of an earlier round of 18,000 layoffs announced in January, as well as the closure of several facilities in the United Kingdom and an Amazon Fresh store in London.
Almost 70,000 people are employed by the Seattle-based e-commerce powerhouse in the UK, whose share price has dropped nearly 50% in the last year. Around the world, 1.5 million people were employed by Amazon as of the end of 2022.
As Wall Street markets opened, Amazon shares dropped 1.5% and are now trading at $97.50. The decline cost Jeff Bezos more than $1 billion and pulled Amazon’s market capitalization back below $1 trillion.
Several tech companies have recently taken initiatives to cut their employee counts. In response to a decline in advertising sales, Facebook parent firm Meta this week revealed intentions to reduce 5,000 positions and trim another 10,000 jobs. Google, on the other hand, laid off 12,000 jobs in January.
