Amazon extends layoff plans to 18,000

E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc on Thursday extended its layoff plans to 18,000 employees citing an uncertain economy and rapid hiring on its part in the past few years, up 80% from the earlier planned job cuts.

“Between the reductions we made in November and the ones we’re sharing today, we plan to eliminate just over 18,000 roles,” Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy wrote in a blog post on Thursday. Amazon will start communicating with the impacted employees starting on January 18, he added.

This comes less than two months after Amazon had decided to lay off about 10,000 people across the globe in corporate and technology, as per a report by the New York Times. In the same month, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a message to the Meta employees that he will reduce the size of the team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 employees go.

In Thursday’s blog, Jassy said most of these layoffs were likely to impact the Amazon Stores and PXT (People eXperience and Technology) teams.

In November, DH had exclusively reported that Amazon offered a voluntary separation programme (VSP) to its India employees in the PXT team, in a company memo dated November 16.

On Thursday, Amazon did not comment on how this extended layoff would impact its employees in India. In reply to DH’s request for comment, it referred us back to Jassy’s blog and added that “We won’t have any additional information at this moment.”

Experts said it would be difficult to predict the impact on its India employees.

"Amazon is a truly global company and hence it would be too tough to estimate if there will be an India impact," said Vijay Sivaram, chief executive of Quess IT Staffing.

However, based on one of the frequently asked questions (FAQ) in the memo obtained by DH in November, another impact on Indian employees cannot be ruled out.

“Does my eligibility for the VSP mean that my job is in jeopardy? Is the company planning to initiate a layoff/reduction in force?” was one of the FAQs.

“Although no final decisions have been made at this time, following the VSP it is possible we may need to engage in future optimisations to align the workforce with business needs,” the company said in the memo.