San Francisco: Amazon appeared to have prematurely disclosed plans for layoffs within Amazon Web Services (AWS) after an internal email and a team-wide meeting invitation were sent to employees hours before the intended announcement.
Amazon was preparing to lay off thousands of corporate employees beginning this week. The company has not yet formally notified affected staff and has not publicly confirmed the layoff plans.
The internal email, sent and signed by Colleen Aubrey, Senior Vice President of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, incorrectly stated that employees in the United States, Canada, and Costa Rica had already been informed of their job losses. The communication referred to the planned workforce reductions under the internal project name ‘Project Dawn.’
Following the email, the meeting scheduled was quickly cancelled. The message also referenced a blog post by Amazon’s head of human resources, Beth Galetti, which had not appeared on the company’s website at the time.
People familiar with the matter stated that roles across AWS, retail, Prime Video, and human resources were expected to be affected, although the overall scale of the cuts planned for this week remained unclear.
Corporate workforce reduction
Amazon previously laid off about 14,000 employees in October as part of a wider plan to reduce its corporate workforce by around 30,000. On January 27, the company also cut jobs in its Fresh grocery and Amazon Go divisions as it plans to close certain physical stores and convert some locations into Whole Foods outlets.
The number of employees impacted by those changes was not disclosed. If fully implemented, the 30,000 job reductions outlined in October would represent nearly 10 percent of Amazon’s corporate workforce, though only a small share of its total global workforce of approximately 1.58 million employees.
In an October blog post, Amazon linked earlier job cuts to the increasing use of artificial intelligence and indicated that additional reductions were likely in the future.
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