Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees

In what would be the largest job cuts in the company's history, Amazon plans to lay off around 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs as soon as this week, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the cuts would focus on Amazon's devices organization, as well as at its retail division and in human resources.

There are a lot of layoffs. Roughly 3 percent of Amazon's corporate employees and less than 1 percent of its global work force are hourly workers.

The souring global economy has put pressure on Amazon to trim businesses that have been overstaffed or underdelivered for a long time.

Amazon would be the latest technology company to lay off workers. The cap on cash compensation for its tech workers was doubled earlier this year.

The tech industry has seen layoffs due to changing business models. Last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook andInstagram, announced it was laying off 11,000 employees, about 13 percent of its work force. Tech firms have laid off workers recently.

Brad Glasser wouldn't comment.

Amazon had its most profitable era on record as consumers and companies went online to shop. Amazon doubled its work force in two years and used the money to expand and experiment.

Amazon's growth slowed to the lowest rate in two decades as the bullwhip of the epidemic broke. Changes in shopping habits and high inflation hurt the company's sales.

In its most recent quarter, Amazon showed a slight rebound. It has warned investors that growth could fall to its lowest level in a decade.

Wall Street was told by the company that it can tighten its belt again. Last week, Amazon executives met with institutional investors, just as the company's stock fell to its lowest level since the early days of the epidemic, wiping $1 trillion off its value.

Mr. Jassy used to run Amazon's lucrative cloud computing business. After pulling back on the warehouse expansion he moved to other parts of the company.

A number of initiatives, including Amazon Care, its service providing primary and urgent health care that failed to find enough customers, and Scout, the cooler-size home delivery robot, have been closed or scaled back in recent months.

It reduced its head count by almost 80,000 people over the course of a few months.

Several smaller teams were not hired by Amazon. More than 10,000 open roles were stopped in October. The cloud computing division of the company was put on hold for a few months.

According to a copy of the talking points seen by The New York Times, recruiters didn't get talking points for job candidates until almost a week after the news broke.

They have been seen as at risk for cuts. A top company priority was the creation of the leading voice assistant, which leaders thought could succeed mobile phones as the next essential consumer interface. In the last two years, Amazon doubled the number of engineers working on the devices. At one point, if an engineer got a job offer for other roles, they should also get an offer from the voice assistant.

Hundreds of millions of devices have been sold by the company The products are often low margin and other potential revenue sources have not caught on, according to Amazon.

A person with knowledge of the finances said that the companies lost $5 billion last year. When Amazon introduced new devices this fall in an annual event, it was more restrained than in the past, when it had featured items like a sticky note printer and a $1,000 home robot.

Amazon's retail business, which covers its physical and online retail business and its logistical operations, has been under strain after the surge of demand. The company has told investors that it is pulling back on expansion plans because of consumer uncertainty.

Brian Olsavsky, the finance chief, told investors last month that there were various factors that weighed on people's pocketbooks. He said that the company was not sure where spending was going, but that they were prepared for a variety of outcomes.