After Twitter and Meta mass layoffs, Amazon is now firing 10,000 employees

The tech world is not getting a breather as constant layoffs plague giants like Twitter, Meta, and now Amazon. It seems like each company is trying to outrank each other with its number of firings, with multiple reports suggesting that Amazon will fire over 10,000 workers this week. These layoffs will mark the highest share of job cuts in the company's history. 

While no specific reason has been offered, recurring factors in the recent tech layoffs in the post-pandemic world include rising rates, decreasing demand, and afterthoughts by the top execs on their company’s overhiring patterns. 

2022 has been a slow year for Amazon: Now that pandemic fears have lessened, people are spending less time at home; leading to a downfall in ordering things from Amazon (a central part of its business). Even the upcoming holiday season is expected to be not that noteworthy. 

Services like Amazon Care (a healthcare service) and Scout (a six-wheeled delivery robot) are also underperforming and a large chunk of its employees are expected to get their jobs axed. 

In North America, Amazon witnessed an operating loss of $0.4 billion Q3 2022 compared to the nearly $1 billion the company achieved in the same quarter in 2021. The situation was worse on the international scale, with Amazon’s Q3 loss amounting to $2.5 billion as opposed to 2021’s $900 million.

The status of the layoffs: November has been the worst month for Amazon, as per Roger Lee who has been tracking tech firings since the pandemic on Layoffs.fyi. 

As for the first two weeks of this month, there have been more than 30,000 employees cut from the tech sector. 

What is also notable about Amazon’s firings is that this is Andy Jassy’s first year in office as the Amazon CEO (following the footsteps of founder Jeff Bezos). Will these firings affect Jassy’s standing in the company? That is yet to be seen as more updates are awaited. 

The bigger picture: Uncertainty looms over the tech sector at the moment, with an avalanche of jobcuts at most major Silicon Valley companies. While Twitter had perhaps the most arbitrary of sackings (including its CEO Elon Musk firing a person on Twitter just today), Meta has axed more than 11,000 people from its workforce. This has also left thousands of H-1B visa holders in the US in a jeopardy, as their visa conditions allow them to stay in the country without a job for only 60 days.