Tech behemoth Amazon (AMZN) said on Monday it would begin another round of layoffs.
The company plans to eliminate 9,000 positions, the third round of layoffs following the initial one last November.
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The job cuts will occur in its cloud service AWS, People Experience and Technology Solutions division called PXT, advertising and Twitch during the next few weeks, CEO Andy Jassy said in a blog post.
Most of Amazon's businesses added a "significant amount" of employees over the past several years, which made sense when the economy was growing, he said.
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Uncertainty About Future Growth
The latest job eliminations are due to the uncertainty of the amount of growth that will occur in the economy in the future, Jassy said.
"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 said. "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."
Amazon did not lay off employees during its most recent round of cuts because "that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall," he said.
"Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. 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."
While some of the layoffs will occur soon, some employees will not know if they have a position until mid to late April, Jassy said.
"The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted," he said. "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 (or where applicable in Europe, with employee representative bodies)."
Amazon will provide severance packages that include a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support.
Tech Companies Cutting Workers
Tech companies began cutting costs last fall as advertising dollars shrunk due to a fear of a contraction in the economy. Google (GOOGL), Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Salesforce (CRM) and Twitter lowered their headcounts in preparation of lower sales and profit margins.
Google cut 12,000 workers while Microsoft reduced 10,000 positions. Meta said on March 14 it would eliminate another 10,000 jobs on top of the 11,000 employees who lost jobs last November.
Amazon continued its layoffs on Jan. 18, totaling 18,000, which is the largest amount in its history.
Employees in some divisions received "voluntary severance” offers last November when the layoffs initially began, according to CNBC.
Those employees received a severance payment of three months of pay, plus one week of salary for every six months of tenure at the company, the report said.
Amazon employees also received a weekly stipend for 12 weeks that could be used toward premiums for COBRA premiums after their health insurance coverage ended Dec. 31.
