Amazon to lay off 9,000 more employees, mostly in AWS, advertising and Twitch: CEO

Amazon.com Inc said on Monday it is laying off 9,000 more employees in the next few weeks, mostly in AWS, advertising and Twitch, CEO Andy Jassy said in a blog post.

Jassy said the company had added substantial amount of staff in the past few years, but the uncertain economy has forced it to choose cost and headcount cuts. The cuts will be concentrated in its cloud services, advertising and Twitch units.

"Given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount," wrote Jassy.

Last week, Facebook-parent Meta Platforms said it would cut 10,000 jobs this year, following the first mass layoff in the fall, which eliminated more than 11,000 jobs.

In January, Amazon eliminated 18,000 positions, the largest round of layoffs in the company’s history.

The latest cuts focus on Amazon's highly-profitable cloud and advertising divisions, once seen as untouchable until economic concerns led business customers to scrutinize their spending.

The layoffs will affect Amazon's streaming unit Twitch as well, following cuts that began in November focused on the company's devices, e-commerce and human-resources organisations. Amazon aims to finalise whom it will terminate by April.

Jassy said the decision stemmed from an ongoing analysis of priorities.

"Some may ask why we didn’t announce these 9,000 role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible," said Jassy.

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Amazon last month said operating profit may continue to slump in the current quarter, hit by the financial impact of consumers and cloud customers clamping down on spending. Sales from its lucrative cloud-computing division slowed during the fourth quarter.

Amazon has scaled back or shut down entire services like its virtual primary care offering for employers.

With inputs from Reuters