Amazon is planning to lay off up to 10,000 employees, making the e-commerce behemoth the latest tech behemoth to implement a large-scale redundancy plan, this was revealed by The New York Times.
This would be less than 1% of the group’s total payroll, which had 1.54 million employees worldwide at the end of September, excluding seasonal workers hired during periods of increased activity such as the Christmas holidays.
According to the Times, the affected positions will be in Amazon’s devices department, retail division, and human resources.
The breakdown by country was not specified.
The total number of employees laid off could change, according to the report, but if confirmed, it would be the largest round of layoffs in the company’s 28-year history, founded by Jeff Bezos.
The layoffs would come after a hiring frenzy. With the coronavirus pandemic causing a surge in online shopping, Amazon more than doubled its workforce from the first quarter of 2020 to 1.62 million employees two years later.
However, with the economy deteriorating, Amazon announced a hiring freeze two weeks ago, and its workforce has already decreased since the beginning of the year.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced last week that it was cutting 11,000 jobs, or roughly 13% of its workforce.
Stripe, an online payment company, and Lyft, a car-hailing app, both reported significant layoffs recently. Twitter, which Elon Musk recently purchased, laid off roughly half of its 7,500 employees earlier this month.
