Amazon is laying off over 18,000 employees

In the latest in tech winter, Amazon is laying off more employees than estimated earlier. A Wall Street Journal report based on an internal document leak by an Amazon employee shows that the tech giant would be laying off 18,000 people in total since November 2022. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has confirmed the news.

In detail: In November 2022, reports said that Amazon is planning on laying off 10,000 employees. But the numbers have since grown. Jassy, who addressed the news in a blog post after the leak, said that they would start telling affected employees from January 18.

• The job cuts will focus on Amazon's corporate workforce which includes positions in the Devices and Books businesses, People (HR), Experience, and Technology (PXT) organisation. 
• Overall, the impacted employees will be 1.2% of Amazon's 1.5 million employees around the globe and 5% of its corporate workforce, which is around 3 lakh.
• Andy Jassy also said that Amazon is working to support all the affected employees in the best possible manner it can.

Why? 

• According to Jassy, Amazon is concerned about the "uncertain economy" and admits that they also hired rapidly in the last few years. 
• Jassy was likely referring to the hiring boom Amazon experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. 
• Covid-19 brought Amazon a lot of business as people flocked to online stores for shopping. 
• During the pandemic-driven demand, Amazon doubled its logistics network and hired hundreds of thousands of employees. 
• But with the world going back to some sort of normalcy, people have moved back to shopping in stores. 
• Amazon also shut several physical stores such as Amazon care and announced a hiring freeze last year. 
• In July 2021, Amazon had a market value of $1.88 trillion, and in 2022, it became the first company in the world to lose a trillion dollar value. 
• In November 2022, the company's value decreased to $879 billion. 
• 2022 was also the year when Amazon posted its first loss in nearly 7 years. 

So, in overview, 2022 was a bad year for most tech companies, whose valuations were humbled. But Amazon is still doing great. Amazon recently made record revenue and profit and secured an $8 billion loan to meet "uncertain macroeconomic environment" needs. 

With over 18,000 layoffs, Amazon now surpasses Meta's 11,000 job cuts announced last year.