Amazon today announced its second round of layoffs. As part of this round, Amazon will eliminate about 9,000 more positions affecting AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch. In January, Amazon eliminated 18,000 positions from other divisions including Alexa, Kindle and more. Despite these layoffs, Amazon will be doing limited hiring in some of its businesses in strategic areas where they have prioritized allocating more resources.
Why didn’t Amazon announce these layoffs in January?
The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.
Amazon plans to complete these layoffs by mid to late April. Affected employees will get packages that include a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support.
 I remain very optimistic about the future and the myriad of opportunities we have, both in our largest businesses, Stores and AWS, and our newer customer experiences and businesses in which we’re investing. – Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
Amazon believes that these layoffs are best for the company in the long term. We hope that it works out as per their plan.
