Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Within hours of the layoffs starting, employees began posting on LinkedIn and the anonymous workplace app Blind that they had been laid off and were looking for new jobs.
Inside Amazon, employees say they’ve been told very little about the layoffs — they haven’t received company-wide communications or notices.
Reductions will primarily affect areas such as retail, human resources, and devices. Earlier this month, Amazon announced a broad hiring freeze for white-collar workers that will last at least “for the next few months.”
The layoffs are expected to be the largest layoffs ever for the company, which has been hiring aggressively over the past decade.
Amazon is expected to continue hiring at its warehouses as it adds staff to support the busy holiday season.
In recent weeks, Twitter, Salesforce, Facebook parent company Meta, and other tech companies have announced large-scale job cuts or hiring freezes. This comes after months of warning signs, including tech startups finding it difficult to raise capital.
Wedbush Securities financial analyst Dan Ives told The Washington Post on Monday that the layoffs could be a sign of an impending recession. Tech companies are “massively bloated and not built for the softening economy that we see,” he said.
Meta cut 11,000 jobs last week, or 13% of its workforce. Ride-hailing service Lyft also said he cut staff by 13%. Fintech firm Stripe and real estate marketplace Zillow have also announced layoffs since October.
Earlier this month, Twitter CEO Elon Musk cut half of the company’s staff shortly after acquiring the social network.
Mass layoffs represent a sharp reversal for Amazon, which has expanded for most of its history. As of the end of September, the company employed more than 1.5 million of his workers, a 5% increase from the previous year. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
Amazon has seen huge growth during the coronavirus crisis as people spend more time at home and shop more online. The company admitted in May that it had staffed its warehouses too early to catch up with cooling demand.
Additionally, in the face of high inflation and increasingly budget-conscious consumers, Amazon released a disappointing forecast for the holiday season (usually the best time of the year), sending its stock price plummeting last month. Amazon’s stock has fallen nearly 39% since the beginning of the year, but it’s still valued at over $1 trillion.
Mandy Dean, 39, was a contract recruiter for Amazon Luna, the company’s cloud gaming platform, in Chicago. The company let her contract expire in September, but she said she is on track for her interview for a permanent position.
It came as no surprise, as Dean said he saw the signs in August.
“It was bad timing for all of that to happen,” Dean said. “I really loved working at Amazon. It was the situation, but there was nothing I could do.”
