US technology giant Amazon has confirmed it will cut 16 000 jobs – hours after it told staff about a new round of global redundancies in an email apparently sent in error.
The email, which has been seen by the BBC, was sent late on Tuesday and refers to a swathe of employees in the US, Canada and Costa Rica having been laid off as part of an effort to “strengthen the company.”
The message was apparently shared by mistake, as it was quickly cancelled.
Early on Wednesday, Amazon announced job reductions as part of a plan to “remove bureaucracy” at the firm.
Beth Galetti, senior vice-president of people experience and technology at Amazon, said on Wednesday it was not planning to make “broad reductions every few months”, referring to Amazon’s announcement of 14 000 job cuts in October.
“While many teams finalised their organisational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now,” she said.
On Tuesday, a draft email written by Colleen Aubrey, a senior vice-president at Amazon Web Services (AWS), was included in a calendar invitation sent by an executive assistant to a number of Amazon workers.
The title of the invitation was “Send project Dawn email,” an apparent reference to Amazon’s code name for the job cuts.
While the email made clear that layoffs were happening at Amazon, employees had not yet been officially informed.
“This is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers,” the email said.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organisation and AWS for future success,” it added.
The 16 000 job cuts had been expected by Amazon employees for weeks, according to a former employee who asked not be identified.
The broad understanding among employees had been that bosses intended to cut a total of around 30 000 roles, added the former employee, who left the company as part of the cuts in October.
The firm was expected to reach that number of job cuts with another major round of layoffs this month, followed by further redundancies until the end of May.
While laid-off workers were invited to reapply for open positions at Amazon, the number of such roles was limited. People who did not move to another role received severance pay based on how long they had worked at the company.
Since 2022, major tech companies like Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft and others have slashed their workforces by laying off tens of thousands of people each year.
Across the entire tech industry, an estimated 700 000 people have been laid off over the last four years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts.
So far this year, Facebook owner Meta has cut more roles, impacting several hundred employees. As has Pinterest, which this week cut around 700 jobs. (BBC)
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