Amazon will lay off another 9,000 employees

The Amazon logo on a company truck in Boston on Oct. 1, 2020. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon will cut another 9,000 jobs in the coming weeks, CEO Andy Jassy announced Monday in a memo to staff.

It would be the second-biggest round of layoffs in the company’s history, on top of the 18,000 announced in January.

Tech companies have announced tens of thousands of job cuts this year, after increasing their payrolls during the pandemic.

In the message, Jassy indicated that the decision was made after the second phase of the company’s annual planning process that concluded this month. He added that Amazon will continue to hire in some strategic areas.

“Some will ask why we didn’t announce these cuts when we announced the others a couple of months ago. The short answer is that not all the teams had finished their analysis by late fall; and instead of making these evaluations hastily without due care, we decided to share these decisions as soon as they were made so that people have the information as quickly as possible, ”said the CEO.

The layoffs announced Monday will hit profitable areas for the company, including its AWS cloud unit and its burgeoning advertising business. There will also be layoffs at the Twitch gaming platform and at PXT, in charge of human resources and other functions.

Earlier cuts also affected PXT, the company’s store division, which encompasses its e-commerce business, as well as physical stores like Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, and other departments like the one that runs the virtual assistant Alexa.

Like other tech companies including Facebook-owner Meta and Google-owner Alphabet, Amazon ramped up hiring during the pandemic to meet the demand of homebound customers.

Amazon’s workforce, in warehouses and offices, doubled to more than 1.6 million people in about two years. But demand slowed as the worst of the pandemic subsided.

Jassy said on Monday that given the economic uncertainty and the “uncertainty that exists in the near future,” the company has chosen to become more efficient.

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