Amazon stated that it would cut another 9,000 jobs, adding to the wave of layoffs sweeping the technology sector as an unstable economy forces companies to downsize. The e-commerce company has cut off 27,000 jobs in the past few months, approximately 300,000 of its workforce, reports a local Arabic daily.
This represents a radical shift for the company which was once seen as untouchable until economic concerns made customers scrutinize their spending.
The layoffs will also affect the video broadcasting platform, Twitch. Dan Clancy, CEO of Twitch said that the platform would lay off more than 400 employees.
The company’s shares fell 1.8 percent and this decision comes within the endless waves of layoffs in the American technology sector, during which major companies such as Microsoft and Alphabet, the owner of Google, removed huge numbers of employees that they had hired individually and in groups.
Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, also announced last week that it will cut 10,000 jobs this year, kicking off a second round of layoffs in the sector after writing off more than 11,000 in 2022.
In a memo to employees posted online by Amazon, Chief Executive Andy Jassy said the decision stemmed from an ongoing analysis of the priorities and uncertainty around the economy.
“Some may ask why we didn’t announce job cuts along with the ones we announced two months ago,” he wrote. “The short answer is that not all teams were completed in the late fall.”
He added, “Given the uncertainty surrounding the economy now and it is expected to continue in the near future, we have opted to reduce our costs and the number of our employees.”
Amazon said last month that operating profit may continue to decline in the current quarter, due to the financial impact of consumers and cloud computing customers cutting spending. The company has also scaled back or stopped entire services such as online healthcare offerings to employers in the past few months.
