Amazon has released a memo on its website revealing that the company plans to eliminate about 9,000 positions over the coming weeks. This is in addition to 18,000 job cuts that were announced in early January, around the time when another tech giant - Salesforce - announced a sizable reduction in its workforce.
In the memo, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy provided more context for the layoffs:
"As our internal businesses evaluated what customers most care about, they made re-prioritization decisions that sometimes led to role reductions, sometimes led to moving people from one initiative to another, and sometimes led to new openings where we don’t have the right skills match from our existing team members."
Jassy also mentioned "limited hiring" in strategic areas of Amazon's businesses. As to why the company didn't announce the exact number of job cuts all at once, Jessy wrote that "not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall" and that the company chose to "share these decisions as they've made them."
Although the memo did not indicate which roles will be impacted by this round of layoffs, some sources say that Amazon's divisions AWS and Twitch and the company's HR and advertising teams were the targets.
The layoffs are set to be completed by mid to late April.
