Amazon layoffs: Which departments may get impacted as tech giant confirms 16,000 job cuts? Check here

E-commerce giant Amazon has confirmed 16,000 job cuts worldwide over the next three months amid its restructuring and expansion plans in artificial intelligence (AI).

Amazon will provide US-based employees 90 days to find a new role internally, along with severance and additional support during their transition, Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, announced in a blog post on Wednesday.

“We’ve been working to strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy,” Galetti said.

The job cuts came a few months after the company announced that it was eliminating 14,000 positions. Together, these layoffs reflect the ongoing layoffs Amazon carried out in late 2022 and early 2023, which affected approximately 27,000 employees.

The company was planning a second round of layoffs as part of its broader strategy of cutting nearly 30,000 corporate roles within the organisation, according to a report by Reuters.

Which divisions will be impacted?

Employees in Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video, and the People Experience and Technology HR units are likely to be impacted, the report said.

Amazon has announced that, despite these changes, it will keep hiring and investing in key strategic areas crucial for our future growth.

“We've been working to strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy. While many teams finalised their organisational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now,” the blogpost read.

Amazon cited the initial round of layoffs in October to the increasing use of artificial intelligence software, according to an internal memo, which said, “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before," the report noted.

CEO Andy Jassy later informed analysts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call that the reduction was“not really financially driven and it’s not even really AI-driven,” rather, he said, “it’s culture."

The 30,000 jobs would represent a small fraction of Amazon’s 1.58 million employees, making up nearly 10% of the corporate workforce. The majority of Amazon’s staff is based in fulfilment centres and warehouses.