Amazon has revealed plans to cut a further 9,000 jobs worldwide, just weeks after it announced the largest number of redundancies in the company’s history.
The online giant said the job losses would mostly affect roles in Amazon Web Services (AWS), People Experience and Technology (PXT), advertising and its livestreaming service Twitch.
It is not yet known if any UK jobs will be affected, but the first redundancies will be made within a few weeks.
The announcement from CEO Andy Jassy came just two months after Amazon said it would cut 18,000 roles worldwide, including those in its consumer retail business and HR division.
Amazon job losses
Amazon faces first UK strike as it plans 18,000 global job cuts
Jassy’s email to employees said: “For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount. This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.”
He said “re-prioritisation decisions” had been made, which sometimes led to role reductions, but also led to moving people from one role to another.
The email said: “Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple [of] months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.
“The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted. Once those decisions have been made (our goal is to have this complete by mid to late April), we will communicate with the impacted employees (or where applicable in Europe, with employee representative bodies).”
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Jassy added that the company would offer redundancy packages that included a payment, transitional health insurance and external job placement support.
