Jeff Bezos-backed giant Amazon is laying off up to 1,000 people from store divisions after its mass layoff of up to 30,000 employees. However, in the post-pandemic era, Amazon has cut up to 73,000 jobs amidst rising AI adoption and intensive spending.
Amazon Cuts 1,000 Jobs
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Amazon has confirmed laying off a small number of jobs who worked under store units. To be precise, a fresh 1,000 jobs have been cut in the retail unit, focusing on managing the e-commerce website. This also comes at a time when Amazon is carrying its biggest shopping days sale, such as Prime Big Deal Days and Great Indian Sale.
“We’ve adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Reuters.
These employees were part of divisions like customer service, selling partner services, and other units. Affected employees belonged to countries like the USA, India, and the United Kingdom.
In an interview with Fox News, Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, cited overhiring in the pandemic as the reason behind the job cut. He revealed that continued job cuts have become necessary because they overhired during the pandemic.
When asked about the previous 30,000 mass layoffs, Bezos told in the interview, “People were staying home and they were ordering, and it was an incredible, stressful period for us, by the way.”
Amazon Layoffs: 73,000 Jobs Cut In 4 Years
In the post-pandemic, between 2020 and 2021, Amazon made rapid hirings due to a surge in e-commerce demand. However, the jobs-cut trend has emerged since 2022.
2022: Up to 10,000 layoffs were carried out, with employees impacted in Devices, Books and PXT. Amazon had warned this year that the broader reduction would be larger.
2023: Amazon later extended its mass layoffs to 27,000. As per reports, over 18,000 employees were eliminated, followed by another 9,000, mainly across stores, PXT, AWS, advertising, and Twitch.
2024: Amazon continued eliminating jobs in areas including Devices, Prime Video, Audible, Twitch and other businesses; there was no single company-wide figure comparable to 2023.
2025: Amazon declared its restructuring program, where up to 30,000 corporate jobs were trimmed, which accounted 10% of its total workforce.
2026-to-date: The start of current year has been brutal for employees under Amazon which fired another 16,000 people in January across its divisions. In July, mild job cuts were announced in its AGI organization, however, the numbers of people impacted were not revealed.
Time skip to October, another round of 1,000 jobs cut in white-collar segment is the latest.
Taking into consideration the above, Amazon has approximately trimmed 73,000 jobs since 2022.
By end last year, Amazon had a total workforce of 1.56 million employees including full-time and part-time workers worldwide.
The job cut comes at a time when tech giants are focused on increasing AI-infrastructure spending. As per reports, Amazon is likely to spend up to $220 billion on data centres, semiconductor infrastructure and other assets for their AI vision.
