At CRN Wade Tyler Millward reports that Amazon is laying off 18,000 people:
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services parent company Amazon, said that the company plans to lay off “just over 18,000†employees with cuts expected in the coming weeks and factoring in layoffs from November.
In a post on Seattle-based Amazon’s website, Jassy said that the majority of the cuts will be at Amazon stores and the People, Experience and Technology (PXT) organization—Amazon’s human resources department. The company had more than 1.5 million employees as of September.
That translates into about 1% of Amazon’s workforce. It’s hard to say whether this will be the extent of Amazon’s layoffs or whether these are just the opening move in what will be a lengthier process to cut costs.
Just as a perspective.
Meta laid off 13%. Salesforce laid off 10%. And both companies are far more profitable then Amazon on most measures.
Although Amazon layoffs are from “corporate”, i.e. white collar workers; and 18K is a much higher percentage of those programmers, buyers, managers, etc. If Amazon needs to reduce its “blue collar” workforce, the churn in that workforce is so high they can achieve it in months by reducing hiring. The real signal of how much Amazon is cutting back will be found in their financial statements where they give the total number of employees.