Amazon’s Wednesday Layoff Plan Flops with Botched Email
On Tuesday, Amazon seemingly notified its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees about impending layoffs scheduled for Wednesday morning by dispatching a commiseration email and a team-wide meeting invitation ahead of time. On Friday, it is reported that Amazon plans to begin laying off thousands of corporate employees starting this week. However, the company has yet to notify affected employees, nor has it verified the layoff strategy. The email dispatched on Tuesday, bearing the signature of Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS, inaccurately stated that affected employees in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica had already been notified of their job losses.
According to Slack messages, AWS employees who received the email reported that the meeting scheduled for Wednesday was promptly canceled. In the email, Amazon referred to the layoffs as “Project Dawn.” Aubrey wrote “Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are challenging and are made with careful consideration as we align our organization and AWS for future success.”
According to sources, jobs in the company’s units encompassing AWS, retail, Prime Video, and human resources were expected to be impacted, although the complete extent of this week’s cuts remains uncertain. In October, Amazon terminated approximately 14,000 employees as part of a larger strategy to cut corporate personnel by roughly 30,000, according to sources. On Tuesday, Amazon announced job cuts in its Fresh grocery and Go market divisions as part of its strategy to close existing brick-and-mortar stores and transition some of them into Whole Foods locations. The number of affected employees was not disclosed.
The extent of the cuts to be revealed on Wednesday is still uncertain. The complete 30,000 positions identified in October would account for a minor fraction of Amazon’s 1.58 million employees, yet it constitutes nearly 10% of the company’s corporate workforce. In a blog post from October, Amazon linked the job cuts to the growing implementation of artificial intelligence. The communication from Beth Galetti, the head of human resources, suggested that additional job cuts could be anticipated in the future.
