American company Amazon will lay off an additional 9,000 jobs worldwide in the coming weeks. This is the second major round of layoffs at the tech giant. 18,000 workers lost their jobs in January.
CEO Andy Jassy announced the news in an email to employees. Cloud service AWS, the advertising industry, and streaming service Twitch are among those affected by the new round of terminations. The multinational corporation’s thousands of jobs represent a fraction of its total workforce of 1.6 million worldwide.
Amazon has a delivery center in Schiphol, Netherlands. Union FNV estimates that between 150 and 200 people work there. It is unclear whether this round of layoffs will affect employees there.
turbulent time
“It was a difficult decision, but one that we believe was the best for the company in the long run,” Jassy writes in the post publicly posted on her website. Like other major tech companies, Amazon is going through a disappointingly turbulent earnings period after years of earnings growth.
In the message, Jassy explains why the announcement of the new mass layoffs has been delayed. In the previous round of layoffs, not all teams would have completed their analysis. According to the CEO, it was decided to clarify the situation for those affected as quickly as possible.
locking boom
During the corona pandemic, Amazon hired many new employees. Due to the quarantine, the speed of ordering products through online stores has increased. Hundreds of thousands of positions have been duly filled.
But like other big tech companies in the US, earnings have been falling since 2021, partly due to economic headwinds. With the “big five” coming together, it makes tens of billions of dollars a year in profit. Just Amazon finished 2022 in the red.
Another tech company that laid off en masse in January was Google’s parent company Alphabet. There, 12,000 people, or 6 percent of the workforce, lost their jobs. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, laid off 11,000 people in November last year.
Source: NOS
Jason Jack is an experienced technology journalist and author at The Nation View. With a background in computer science and engineering, he has a deep understanding of the latest technology trends and developments. He writes about a wide range of technology topics, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, software development, and cybersecurity.
