The technology giant Amazon – where around 1.5 million people work and one of the largest employers in the United States – plans to lay off approximately 10,000 workers starting this week, The New York Times reported.
This would be the largest cut in the company’s history and would represent roughly 3% of Amazon’s corporate employees and less than 1% of its global workforce of more than 1.5 million.
The cuts will target Amazon’s device organization, including the Alexa voice assistant, as well as its retail division and human resources, noted the sources, who spoke to the outlet on condition of anonymity.
Amazon said two weeks ago that it had decided to pause corporate hiring because the economy was “in an uncertain place.”
“We will maintain this pause for the next few months and will continue to monitor what we are seeing in the economy and in the business to make the necessary adjustments.”, the vice president of the People and Technology Experience section, Beth Galetti, said in a statement.
It is striking that this potential cut comes so close to the holiday shopping season, when the internet shopping giant typically values stability.
If the layoffs do happen, Amazon would be the latest company to join the long list of tech companies that opted for mass layoffs.
This month, Meta – parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – announced that it will lay off 11,000 workers, 13% of its workforce; Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, laid off half the staff of a workforce of about 7,500 people worldwide.
While the car-sharing company Lyft said it would cut 13% of its employees and Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would cut 14% of its employees, roughly 1,100 jobs.
With information from EFE
