Meanwhile, other employees compiled lists of those divisions that were experiencing cuts and those that might be safe, based on a combination of the LinkedIn confessionals, self-reported information, and internal rumors. The division that houses Alexa and Amazon’s own tech gadgets had lost more than $5 billion annually in recent years, the Wall Street Journal reported in early November. One employee in Alexa’s AI division said 60 percent of her team had been let go “attributed to downsizing/prioritizing projects.” While Alexa is one of the flagship brands that Amazon is best known for, the company has been unable to generate significant revenue for the voice assistant service in the eight years since it launched and soared in popularity. Soon, laid-off employees began flooding LinkedIn with their personal announcements. They were told the bad news via a script. Some Amazon employees - most notably those working in the flashy but unprofitable Alexa voice assistant division - found a calendar invitation for a 15-minute videoconference awaiting them. On Tuesday morning, that began happening. A source familiar with the decisions said the company’s business leaders wanted to communicate the layoffs to those who were losing their job first, before broadcasting a message to the entire company. Some managers told employees they thought their division was safe, but others said they knew little. This time around, by the evening of the day the news first broke, many employees had pushed aside the day’s work in favor of talking with colleagues to gather crumbs of intelligence about the future of their livelihoods. Amazon laid off several hundred employees in 2018, but its last significant job cuts date all the way back to 2001, when it axed 1,500 people, or 15 percent of its then-staff, in the wake of the dot-com crash and amid a brief US recession. The messiness of Amazon’s layoff rollout also underscores how rare such a moment is for the king of e-commerce. The job cuts at Amazon are just the latest among the ruling class of tech companies used to years of dominant growth and convinced by pandemic-fueled business success that an economic pullback wasn’t on the horizon. “This is a horrendous way to treat people.”Īre you a current or former Amazon employee with thoughts or tips on this topic? Please email Jason Del Rey at or His phone number and Signal number are available upon request by email. “I don’t even know if I want to work for this company any more,” an Amazon senior manager who has worked at the company for more than 10 years told Recode on Wednesday afternoon, referencing the lack of transparency from company leaders. And even then, it was unclear to many employees if they would soon lose their jobs too. It would take another day and half for acknowledgment from Jassy, who wrote in a blog post on Thursday that the cuts were “the most difficult decision” Amazon has made during his year and a half as CEO. In the end, 48 hours would pass between when news of the layoffs first broke in the press and when a top company executive acknowledged the tough reality to the rest of the company. Amazon had recently frozen hiring in some divisions and axed some experimental initiatives, and a company executive warned on recent calls with reporters and Wall Street analysts that shoppers are tightening their belts and Amazon would be too.Īfter the first report of expected layoffs, many employees assumed they would soon hear from someone at the top of the company - either CEO Andy Jassy or one of his deputies. The cycle began on Monday morning when the New York Times reported that Amazon would eliminate approximately 10,000 jobs - or around 3 percent of its worldwide corporate staff. And even when the company’s CEO finally commented on Thursday, he said an unspecified number of additional layoffs would happen early in 2023, leaving many employees wondering if they would have a job in a few months. But the lack of communication from top Amazon leaders for two full days following the first news report of impending layoffs incited chaos and anger among rank-and-file employees searching for answers amid a rare retrenchment in the tech giant’s 27-year history. The largest layoffs in Amazon’s history began on Tuesday, with job cuts in the company’s money-burning Alexa voice assistant division and voluntary buyout offers sent to many human resources employees.
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