1. Home
  2. / Economy
  3. / Amazon Chief Announces Largest Layoff in Company’s History, Over 18,000 Workers to Be Laid Off Starting January 18
Reading time 3 min of reading

Amazon Chief Announces Largest Layoff in Company’s History, Over 18,000 Workers to Be Laid Off Starting January 18

Written by Flavia Marinho
Published on 13/01/2023 at 18:52
Amazon - Salesforce - Facebook - Twitter - Snap - Vimeo
Amazon, Andy Jassy – Imagem Olhar Digital
Seja o primeiro a reagir!
Reagir ao artigo

Other Tech Giants Like Salesforce, Facebook Meta, As Well As Twitter, Snap, And Vimeo Also Begin Mass Layoffs!

The American giant Amazon is laying off 18,000 employees. The numbers represent the largest job cuts at a tech company since the industry began aggressively scaling back last year.

In a blog post, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that the workforce reductions were triggered by the uncertain economy and the company’s rapid hiring in recent years.

The cuts will primarily affect the company’s corporate workforce and will not impact warehouse workers for now. In November, Amazon reportedly planned to lay off about 10,000 employees, but last Wednesday Jassy indicated that the number of jobs to be cut by the company will be much higher than that.

Jassy tried to strike an optimistic note in the post announcing the huge workforce reduction, writing: “Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so“.

18,000 Represents The Average Of 1% Of Amazon’s 1.5 Million Workers In Warehouses And Corporate Offices.

While 18,000 is a significant number of jobs, it is just a little over 1% of Amazon’s 1.5 million workers in warehouses and corporate offices.

Last year, Amazon was the latest Big Tech company to see growth slow following its pandemic-era boom, as inflation hit a 40-year high.

For Amazon, the pandemic was a tremendous boon to its bottom line, with online sales soaring as people avoided in-person shopping and the need for cloud storage surged as more companies and governments moved operations online. This, in turn, led Amazon to launch a wave of hiring, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs in recent years.

CEO Jassy, in his blog post, acknowledged that while the company’s hiring went too far, the company aims to help cushion the blow for laid-off workers.

“We are working to support those affected and are providing packages that include severance pay, transitional healthcare benefits, and external job placement support”, Jassy said.

Salesforce, Facebook Meta, As Well As Twitter, Snap, And Vimeo Also Announce Mass Layoffs

The news of Amazon’s cuts came on the same day that business software giant Salesforce announced its own round of layoffs, eliminating 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 jobs.

Salesforce co-CEO Mark Benioff attributed the scale back to a line now frequently repeated in Silicon Valley: The pandemic boom times led the company to overhire. And now that there has been a pullback in corporate spending, the focus is on cutting costs.

“As our revenue accelerated during the pandemic, we hired too many people, leading to this economic crisis that we are now facing”, Benioff wrote in a note to the team.

The owners of Facebook Meta, as well as Twitter, Snap, and Vimeo, announced major layoffs in recent months, a notable reversal for an industry that has been experiencing growth for over a decade.

Flavia Marinho

Flavia Marinho é Engenheira pós-graduada, com vasta experiência na indústria de construção naval onshore e offshore. Nos últimos anos, tem se dedicado a escrever artigos para sites de notícias nas áreas militar, segurança, indústria, petróleo e gás, energia, construção naval, geopolítica, empregos e cursos. Entre em contato com flaviacamil@gmail.com ou WhatsApp +55 21 973996379 para correções, sugestão de pauta, divulgação de vagas de emprego ou proposta de publicidade em nosso portal.

Share in apps