Amazon plans to cut 9,000 jobs in next few weeks, second largest round of layoffs in company's history

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Amazon plans to cut 9,000 jobs in next few weeks, second largest round of layoffs in company's history

In a memo sent this week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company plans to cut another 9,000 jobs in the next few weeks, the second largest round of layoffs in the company's history, and add to the 18,000 staff it laid off in January.

The tech companies have announced tens of thousands of firings this year.

In his memo, Jassy stated that the second phase of Amazon's annual planning process, completed this month, resulted in additional job cuts, but the company will still hire more staff in some strategic areas.

Some may ask why we did not announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple of months ago. In the late fall, not all of the teams were done with their analyses, he said.

The company's profitable areas, including its cloud computing unit, AWS, and growing advertising business, will be hit by the firings.

The tech giant has laid off its stores division, PXT, which includes its e-commerce business and brick and mortar stores, such as Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go.

Amazon has announced earlier this month that it will postpone the construction of its headquarters in northern Virginia.

In response to the COVID- 19 epidemic, Amazon, along with other tech companies, such as Meta and Alphabet, increased hiring when the number of Amazon's warehouse and office staff doubled to more than 1.6 million people in two years.

Amazon halted its warehouse expansion plans last year after the worst of the epidemic ended, as demand slowed.

The company has chosen to be more streamlined because of the uncertainty surrounding the economy, according to Jassy.