Amazon plans to lay off 9,000 more workers: CEO

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Monday that he will remove 9,000 additional employees from the online retail giant’s staff, adding to the 18,000 laid off in January.

The new layoffs come after the business stated earlier this year that it was shedding 18,000 jobs as part of a massive cost-saving effort at the e-commerce behemoth.

“Given the uncertain economy… and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,” Jassy said in a memo to staff.

Jassy said the fresh round of job cuts will take place in the coming weeks, and will mostly impact people working in the following divisions: Amazon Web Services, People Experience and Technology Solutions (PXT), advertising and Twitch.

“This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term,” Jassy wrote in the memo.

“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago,” Jassy added. “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 new layoffs at Amazon follow a wave of job losses in the technology industry in recent months, as the sector deals with a surge in pandemic-induced demand for digital products and services, as well as broader financial uncertainties.

During the early days of the epidemic, Amazon, like a number of other Big Tech businesses, aggressively increased its personnel.

Jassy wrote on Monday that the hiring “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 added.

Just last week, Facebook-parent Meta said it was laying off an additional 10,000 workers, on top of the 11,000 job cuts announced late last year.