Amazon reportedly will lay off thousands of people
The New York Times reported that “people with knowledge of the matter” said that the Jeff Bezos-owned e-commerce company will start laying off people this week. Those who know about these layoffs were not allowed to speak publicly and spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity. While the exact number of employees affected by this is unknown, it is said to be around 10,000 people.
NYT report suggests that this would be Amazon’s largest layoff in history
That would make this the largest round of layoffs in the company’s history.
According to The New York Times, a spokesperson from Amazon declined to comment. Per the anonymous sources: “The cuts will focus on Amazon’s devices organization, including the voice-assistant Alexa, as well as at its retail division and in human resources.”
The Wall Street Journal reported late last week that CEO Andy Jassy was taking a closer look at the company’s profitability including examining the operating loss of the Alexa business.
Twitter, Lyft, Meta and other companies recently had mass layoffs
These layoffs follow other high profile tech companies also significantly cutting their workforce.
The Deseret News previously reported that Elon Musk, who recently bought Twitter, had cut half of the 7,500-person workforce at the social media company. Laid off employees were notified via email. The New York Times reported that this wasn’t the largest layoff in the history of tech companies. HP had laid off tens of thousands of employees. More recently, The New York Times reported: “On Thursday, Lyft said it would lay off 13 percent, or about 650, of its 5,000 employees. Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would cut 14 percent of its jobs, or roughly 1,100.”
Meta (parent company of Facebook) also recently announced plans to lay off over 11,000 employees. The Deseret News said that Mark Zuckerberg announced the layoffs in a letter sent to the company. In addition to laying off these employees, Zuckerberg said, “We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”
The Washington Post reported that Google has slowed down its hiring along with other Silicon Valley companies enacting hiring freezes.
The Amazon layoffs is a breaking news story and more information is forthcoming.