The e-commerce giant joins other tech companies in mounting layoffs

Amazon began laying off employees as managers gave employees a chance to look for another job inside the company or receive severance pay. Other reports say the workforce is annoyed that the company hasn’t sent out any company-wide announcements to acknowledge the extent and scope of the cuts.

CEO Andy Jassy’s aggressive cost-cutting measures has received wide media attention. The company will fire 10,000 individuals or around 3% of its corporate workforce as of this week. This will be the largest ‘workforce reduction’ the e-commerce and cloud computing powerhouse has ever implemented in its almost 30 year history. 

Retail and human resources are apparently also impacted, in addition to Luna, the business’ cloud gaming service. It’s been less than two months since Google shut down Stadia, its competing service. 

Amazon’s devices division which includes Echo products, Fire tablets and its Alexa business was a leading contender for closure given that it has reportedly been losing $5 billion in revenue yearly. Scout, a robot that handles deliveries in the last mile, was another casualty in  the company’s bigger restructure of the robotics division.

Large tech companies are making big layoffs as they prepare for economic headwinds. Meta laid off 11,000 workers, Twitter has also begun to lay off thousands of staff as Salesforce and Stripe face internal restructuring.