The Seattle company’s growth boomed during the early years of the pandemic, when people turned to online ordering to avoid leaving their homes. But that rocketing growth has waned for Amazon and other tech giants. Several of them, including Facebook, Google and Microsoft have announced mass layoffs in recent months. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Amazon said this round of cuts would take place in some of its biggest businesses, including its cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services and its advertising unit, as well as in video game streaming business Twitch and other corporate divisions.
Amazon recently returned a mandatory return to office, which frustrated thousands of employees who joined an internal Slack group to protest the decision.
Earlier this month, the company announced it was pausing construction on its much anticipated second headquarters in Arlington, Va.; it has also closed, canceled, or delayed dozens of other development projects around the country.
CEO Andy Jassy said the latest cuts were decided after business units landed on their priorities for future investment.
“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago,” he wrote in an announcement Monday. “The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; 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.”
