Amazon is planning to lay off approx. 10,000 employees in corporate and technology jobs starting as soon as this week, the New York Times reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter said. The layoff would be the largest job cut in the history of the company.
The announcement comes just a few days after Amazon became the first company ever to lose $1 trillion in market value. Amazon becomes the latest in a series of tech companies to announce layoffs in recent months. Just last week, Facebook’s Meta laid off over 11,000 employees after losing $700 billion of its value over a risky metaverse bet.
The total number of layoffs remains fluid at this point. But if the layoff number stays around 10,000, that would represent about 3 percent of the retail giant’s corporate employees and less than 1 percent of its global workforce of more than 1.5 million, which is primarily composed of hourly workers, the New York Times reported.
Also last week, Twitter also announced a plan to lay off 25% of its workforce of 7,500 employees in the first round of job cuts. Musk told investors in his $44 billion takeover deal to buy the social giant “that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000.”
The global economic downturn that started in the second quarter of this year is beginning to have a major impact on tech companies. As we reported last month, over 32,000 tech workers lost their jobs in July. That number has since climbed to about 45,000 as of October, according to the latest tally from CrunchBase, a platform for finding business information about private and public companies.
Tech giants like Amazon, Google’s Alphabet, and Facebook’s Meta have all taken measures to rein in spending. Other companies like Coinbase, Shopify, Netflix, and Twilio have also announced layoffs.
