Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers in second round of job cuts

Tech giant Amazon has decided to cut another 9,000 jobs across its businesses in the latest round of layoffs, according to CEO Andy Jassy.

The latest layoffs come months after the company decided to let go of more than 18,000 employees in November and January. The latest job cuts will affect departments such as People, Experience, and Technology (PXT), advertising, and Twitch.

"For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount. This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole," read the memo sent to the employees.

"However, 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," Jassy said.

"The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers' lives and Amazon as a whole," he added.

The Amazon layoffs will not only affect its own employees, but Twitch, an American video live-streaming service, will also have to let go of around 400 people. Amazon acquired Twitch Interactive for $970 million in 2014.

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said that "user and revenue growth has not kept pace with the company's pace," and that is why the company had to take the call of reducing its workforce.

"Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. To run our business sustainably, we have made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce," read the letter from Clancy to Twitch employees.

It is to be noted that the layoffs come amid several other tech companies taking similar decisions after experiencing a brief hiring boom during COVID-19 lockdowns. Firms like Meta, Netflix, and Twitter have also laid off hundreds of their employees in the last few months. Meta announced its decision to lay off 10,000 more workers last week.

"Here's the timeline you should expect: over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to employees.

He added that the company will also close the 5,000 additional positions it has not been able to fill yet. It attributed the changes to the "economic instability which is expected to last for many years."

Recently, streaming platform Netflix has had to lay off 300 of its employees after reporting a decline in revenue at the start of 2022, per its co-chief executive Ted Sarandos. The current layoffs account for almost 4 percent of its workforce, and most of them involve its employees in the US.

Twitter also let go of as many as 200 people in the latest round of job cuts, according to a report in The New York Times.

The layoffs took place last week and included product managers, data scientists, and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability. Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired half of the company's 7,500 staff soon after taking over Twitter in November last year. The move was one of several steps taken by Musk to cut costs.

Other firms, such as Twilio, Dell, Zoom, and eBay, also made significant reductions to their workforces. Microsoft also recently announced its plans to cut 10,000 employees.

The development comes against the backdrop of reports claiming that the labour market boom the US witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic is coming to an end. The tech sector is especially hit with several start-ups cutting their workforce.