Amazon is cutting another 9,000 jobs as tech industry keeps shrinking

March 20th, 2023

Amazon is adding video telemedicine visits in all 50 states to the virtual clinic it launched last fall, as the e-commerce giant pushes deeper into care delivery.
Mark Lennihan / Mark Lennihan

Amazon is cutting another 9,000 workers, adding to the massive downsizing happening across an embattled tech sector that is uncertain about the economic future.

The layoffs will happen “in the coming weeks,” according to CEO Andy Jassy, who announced the cuts in a memo shared with staff and uploaded in a blog post on Monday.

“This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term,” Jassy wrote in the memo. He said the layoffs will mostly hit employees in its cloud platform, people’s experience department that works with employees, advertising, and the Twitch video service.

Earlier this year, Jassy announced the company would lay off 18,000 workers, a deeper cut than it had planned last November, when it announced it would slash 10,000 jobs.

The company has also paused construction on its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, a space that was expected to bring more than 25,000 jobs to the region.

Like other Big Tech companies, Amazon’s workforce ballooned during the pandemic, reaching a peak of 1.6 million employees in 2021.

The rapid hiring “made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole,” said Jassy on Monday. “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.”

Jassy said the company aims to make final decisions on impacted roles by “mid to late April.”