Amazon Employees Brace for at Least 30,000 Layoffs: Here’s Who Could Be Impacted

E-commerce and cloud computing giant Amazon is reportedly set to begin issuing pink slips to a vast number of its employees starting today. The layoffs are part of CEO Andy Jassy’s plan to make the organisation “fast-moving, lean and scrappy.”

Several US media outlets described this as Amazon’s largest round of layoffs since late 2022, when it let go of about 27,000 employees. The Seattle-based company currently employs 1.55 million people worldwide — across warehouses and other divisions, both full-time and temporary — but only around 350,000 of them are corporate employees.

According to Reuters, nearly 10% of Amazon’s corporate workforce could be affected, translating to roughly 30,000 people.

For Amazon employees, these job cuts are not new. Earlier reports indicated that the company had laid off hundreds of staff in its cloud division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in July, followed by similar cuts in its Books, Devices & Services, and Podcast units earlier this month.

Who’s Affected by Amazon Layoffs?

Reports suggest that managers of affected teams were instructed to attend training sessions on Monday to learn how to communicate with staff after email notifications begin going out on Tuesday morning.

CEO Jassy has reportedly been driving an initiative to eliminate what he calls excessive bureaucracy, partly by reducing the number of managerial positions. Earlier this year, he introduced an anonymous complaint channel to identify inefficiencies, which has received around 1,500 submissions and led to more than 450 process changes.

The programme to cut bureaucracy began earlier this year by requiring employees to return to the office five days a week. However, according to Reuters, this did not lead to the level of attrition Amazon expected, prompting another phase of mass layoffs.

The company is now reportedly targeting employees who have not been swiping in daily, either because they live far from corporate offices or for other reasons. These employees are allegedly being told to resign and leave without severance pay, helping the company cut costs.

Division-wise, the latest round of layoffs is expected to affect multiple units, including Human Resources (PXT), Operations, Devices and Services, and AWS. Over the past two years, Amazon has also trimmed smaller numbers of jobs across divisions such as Devices, Communications, and Podcasting.

It is not yet clear whether the impact of these layoffs will be felt in India. According to its website, Amazon directly employs about 120,000 people in the country. These roles span fulfilment and distribution centres, customer service, software development, human resources, programme management, machine learning data services, and seller support, among others. The e-commerce giant’s largest corporate office outside the US is located in Hyderabad, with additional offices in Chennai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Kolkata.

Is Amazon’s Layoff Driven by Generative AI?

In a public blog on Amazon’s website in June, Jassy said that increased adoption of artificial intelligence tools is expected to lead to further job reductions, particularly through the automation of repetitive and routine tasks.

“We’re going to keep pushing to operate like the world’s largest start-up — customer-obsessed, inventive, fast-moving, lean, scrappy, and full of missionaries trying to build something better for customers and a business that outlasts us all. You will continue to see the team and me take actions to help us move faster, have more ownership, and invent more easily. AI will be a substantial catalyst here,” he wrote.

He added, “As we roll out more generative AI and agents...we’ll need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we gain efficiency from using AI extensively across the company.”

Amazon Not Alone in Layoffs

While the scale of Amazon’s latest job cuts is significant, the company is far from alone in reducing headcount this year. According to Layoffs.fyi, a website tracking job cuts across the tech industry, around 98,000 positions have been eliminated so far in 2025 across 216 companies, following 153,000 job losses in 2024.

The list includes major players such as Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, and Meta, along with smaller firms like Twitch, Duolingo, and Grammarly.