Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has confirmed that its cloud division will be affected by its next round of job cuts, with 9,000 employees across several business units set to lose their roles over the coming weeks.
In an email to staff, published on the Amazon company news page, Jassy said job cuts will affect Amazon Web Services (AWS), its live-streaming service Twitch, the Amazon People Experience and Technology Solutions (PXT) division and its advertising arm.
The news follows Amazon’s announcement in January 2023 that it would be cutting 18,000 jobs across the company after rapidly expanding its headcount during the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.
“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,” Jassy wrote.
“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole.”
The email goes on to explain why the company is making another round of job cuts so swiftly after the ones its announced earlier this year, with Jassy stating that this was down to the fact that not all of its teams had completed their assessments of what roles should be cut.
“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,” he said.
“The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not just 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.”
News of the job cuts follows the news of Amazon’s hiring freeze, which the company confirmed in November 2022, and is understood to have affected the staffing and productivity of the AWS sustainability team.
It also comes hot on the heels of several quarters of slowing revenue growth for AWS, which the company has attributed to a slowdown in enterprise cloud spending due to “tough macroeconomic conditions”.
The Jassy email does not detail how many jobs are expected to be lost from AWS directly, but he closed out the missive by insisting that the job cuts will have no negative bearing on its customers.
“Being leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole – I believe the result of this year’s planning cycle is a plan that accomplishes this,” he added.
“I remain very optimistic about the future and the myriad of opportunities we have, both in our largest, businesses, Stores and AWS, and our newer customer experiences and businesses in which we’re investing.”
