Amazon to Eliminate More Than 18,000 Jobs, CEO Says

Amazon plans to cut more than 18,000 jobs as part of a workforce reduction it revealed in November, the internet retailer said Wednesday.

The layoffs at Amazon will affect several divisions, but the majority are in the company's human resources and retail operations. CEO Andy Jassy said in a blog post Wednesday that affected employees will be notified by Jan. 18.

"Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so," Jassy wrote in the post.

In November, when Jassy announced the company had begun workforce reductions, Amazon didn't reveal how many jobs would be cut, but the consensus was that about 10,000 positions would be eliminated. Jassy also said at the time that cuts would continue into 2023.

The announcement is the latest sign of distress for Amazon, which over the past three years went through a huge growth spurt followed by a slowdown in revenue and a loss of $1 trillion in market value. Other companies in online retail and advertising have said they wrongly believed the boost to online shopping was permanent, leading them to over-hire during the pandemic. Jassy has said in press interviews that he believes the company's pandemic-era growth was the right choice, despite the risk that demand wouldn't last.

Amazon saw a boom in online shopping starting in 2020. Fueled first by lockdowns and then by stimulus cash, the company's profits shot up for more than a year. The company doubled its ranks from just under 800,000 employees at the end of 2019 to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021. But in the middle of 2021, Amazon's growth stalled, and at the beginning of 2022 the company posted its first loss in seven years. At the time that Jassy announced the job cuts in November, Amazon's stock had lost roughly half of its value in 11 months.

Jassy said in November that the process of reducing the workforce was complicated by the "challenging spot" the economy is in, along with the fact that Amazon rapidly hired employees in recent years. The company began cutting back in a number of areas, even before November's round of layoffs and buyouts.

In the past few months, Jassy halted testing on Amazon Scout, the company's robotic home-delivery initiative. He's also shuttered the Amazon Care telehealth and nursing service, as well as Fabric.com, a longtime online fabric retailer. Amazon imposed a hiring freeze for small teams in September, followed by a corporate-wide freeze earlier this month. 

The layoffs at Amazon reflect the turbulence facing the tech industry. Twitter, Microsoft, Meta and Google also have let go thousands of workers in recent months.