Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced on Monday that he would cut 9,000 more employees from the online retail giant’s workforce, adding to the 18,000 laid off in January.
The latest layoffs come after the company announced earlier this year that it was cutting 18,000 jobs as part of a major cost-cutting effort at the e-commerce giant. “Given the uncertain economy… and the uncertainty that exists shortly,” Jassy wrote in a memo to employees.
According to Jassy, the new round of layoffs will take place in the coming weeks and will primarily affect employees in the following divisions: Amazon Web Services, People Experience and Technology Solutions (PXT), advertising, and Twitch.
Jassy mentioned in the memo that this was a difficult decision, but they believed it was in the best interests of the company in the long run.”
“Some may wonder why we didn’t announce these role reductions alongside the ones a few months ago,” Jassy explained. “The short answer is that not all of the teams completed their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rushing through these assessments without due diligence, we chose to share these decisions to the people as soon as possible as they made people disturbed.”
The latest dismiss at Amazon followed a wave of job cuts recently in the technology industry as the sector deals with a surge in pandemic-induced demand for digital goods and services as well as broader macroeconomic uncertainty.
During the early days of the pandemic Amazon like several other Big Tech companies, rapidly increased its headcount. On Monday Jassy wrote that the hiring made sense given what was going on in their businesses and the economy as a whole. However, given the uncertain economy in which they live and the uncertainty that exists shortly, they have chosen to be more streamlined in their costs and headcount.
Just last week, Facebook’s parent company, Meta announced an additional 10,000 job cuts, on top of the 11,000 announced late last year.