Amazon confirms thousands of job cuts

It was reported last week that Amazon would cut thousands of jobs, with this now confirmed to be 16,000, only months after 14,000 staff were made redundant in October.

Amazon announced the job reductions as part of the process to “remove bureaucracy” at the firm, with the majority of roles being cut in the US.

Some UK positions will be removed as well, but the group did not confirm how many roles this would be.

Amazon senior vice president of people, experience and technology Beth Galetti said: “As I shared in October, we’ve been working to strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy.

“While many teams finalised their organisational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now.”

She said Amazon was not planning to make “broad reductions every few months” and that US-based staff will have 90 days to look for a new role within the business. 

Severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance will be offered to those who decide to move on or cannot find a suitable role.

The confirmation of the job cuts arrived after an email was mistakenly sent to Amazon Web Services cloud computing employees on Tuesday about redundancies planned in the US, Canada and Costa Rica. The email, signed by senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS Colleen Aubrey,  was quickly cancelled.

It wrongly said that employees impacted by job losses had been informed.

The email said: “This is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers.

“Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organisation and AWS for future success.”

It was also confirmed this week that Amazon would close its 70 remaining Amazon-branded grocery stores, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go.