Amazon. AMZN -0.79% com Inc. layoffs will affect more than 17,000 employees, the highest number of layoffs reported at a major tech company over the past year as the industry slows amid economic uncertainty, according to people familiar with the matter .
The Seattle-based company announced in November that it was beginning layoffs among its corporate workforce, with cuts focused on the appliance business, recruiting and retail. At the time, the Wall Street Journal reported that the cuts would total about 10,000 people. Thousands of these cuts began last year.
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The rest of the cuts will bring the total number of layoffs to more than 17,000 and will come in the coming weeks, some of the people said. In September, Amazon AMZN -0.79% employed 1.5 million people, much of them in its warehouses. The layoffs are focused on corporate ranks at the company, some of the people said.
Amazon has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Covid-19 pandemic as customers flocked to shop online. The rush into Amazon’s diverse businesses, from e-commerce to groceries to cloud computing, has spurred years of growth for the company. To keep up with demand, Amazon doubled its logistics network and hired hundreds of thousands of workers.
As demand began to wane and customers started shopping in-store again, Amazon launched a broad cost-cutting scrutiny to reduce unprofitable units, the Journal reported. During the spring and summer, the company made targeted cuts to cut costs, closing physical stores and business units like Amazon Care. Amazon later announced a company-wide hiring freeze before deciding to lay off employees.
Many tech companies have cut jobs as the economy turns sour. The layoffs of more than 17,000 employees at Amazon represent the highest number of layoffs by a tech company in recent months, according to figures published on Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks events as they appear in media reports and company publications.
The trend has affected companies like Amazon and others, which have acknowledged they’ve been growing too fast in many cases. Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. said it will lay off more than 11,000 workers, or 13% of its workforce, on top of layoffs at Lyft Inc., HP Inc. and other tech companies. On Wednesday, Salesforce Inc. announced that it was laying off 10% of its workforce. Co-Chief Executive Marc Benioff said the enterprise software provider hired too many employees as revenue soared early in the pandemic. “I take responsibility for that,” he said.
write to Dana Mattioli at [email protected] and Jessica Toonkel at [email protected]
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