Amazon has confirmed a fresh round of job cuts, primarily in its Stores business, which runs its main e-commerce platform, with fewer than 1,000 employees believed to be affected.
The company described the reductions as a “small number” of roles.
A person familiar with the matter said fewer than 1,000 white-collar workers were let go, Business Insider reported. Amazon has not published an exact figure.
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Employees began reporting the cuts on Tuesday, when some said they had received emails informing them that their roles had been eliminated.
An internal Slack channel with nearly 37,000 members quickly filled with questions on severance, access to internal job postings and whether more notifications were due, the outlet reported.
Messages in the channel suggested the cuts touched several units, including customer service, marketplace and seller support, and engineering roles in the retail business.
Employees in the US, India and the UK were among those affected, while some staff wondered whether Mexico and other parts of Europe would also be hit, as per Reuters.
“We’re always looking at our team structures to ensure we’re best set up to move fast as we innovate for customers,” an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider.
“We’ve adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities,” the spokesperson added, saying the company was committed to supporting affected employees through their transition.
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The timing drew attention because the layoffs coincided with Prime Big Deal Days, one of Amazon’s biggest shopping events, which began on Tuesday and runs through Wednesday.
The latest reductions follow a larger round of about 30,000 corporate job cuts that began late last year and continued into January.
Business Insider reported that employees have been bracing for further layoffs since then, and that some team leaders had scaled back planning for coming quarters because they expected priorities to change.
Workers also asked whether those who received outside job offers during the 90-day notification period would have to forfeit severance if they left early.
The cuts come as Amazon prepares for what has reportely been described as its biggest spending drive yet.
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The company is expected to spend a record $220 billion on data centres, chips and other infrastructure for artificial intelligence, even as it trims its corporate workforce to cut costs and flatten its organisation.
Separately, Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos said in a Fox News interview aired on Wednesday that continued job cuts had been necessary because the company overhired during the pandemic.
“People were staying home and they were ordering, and it was an incredible, stressful period for us,” he said, referring to the earlier round of 30,000 job losses.
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