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Amazon’s latest layoffs cut 9,000 more jobs in divisions including Twitch and AWS

Amazon’s latest layoffs cut 9,000 more jobs in divisions including Twitch and AWS

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Amazon’s latest round of layoffs adds to the 18,000 job cuts that have already been announced. Divisions impacted in this latest round include HR, Amazon Web Services (AWS), advertising, and Twitch.

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Illustration of Amazon’s logo on a black, orange, and tan background.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon is laying off another 9,000 workers, according to a memo to employees CEO Andy Jassy sent to workers on Monday. The employees affected by the cut include those in roles in AWS, Twitch, advertising, and human resources.

In his memo, Jassy cites the “uncertain economy” as the reason for the cuts and says the company has “chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.” Amazon just got done laying off a total of 18,000 people across the company late last year and in January, which included workers in its hardware and services, human resources, and retail teams.

“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” Jassy writes in the memo.

This also comes just days after Twitch CEO Emmett Shear resigned from his position, although it’s unclear whether that was related to the job cuts, as Shear will still remain at the company in an advisory role. “Just over” 400 people were affected by the cuts, according to a blog post from CEO Dan Clancy. As Twitch continues to evolve, recent changes to the way it splits the revenue with streamers have left some feeling frustrated, while some of the platform’s top streamers have swapped to game streaming rivals like YouTube.

“Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations,” Clancy writes. “In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.” When we asked for additional details, Twitch spokesperson Samantha Faught declined to comment and directed us to Clancy’s blog post.

Jassy explains that the company didn’t announce all of the layoffs at the same time because some teams didn’t complete their internal analyses simultaneously. These assessments could lead to the reprioritization of jobs, Jassy notes, and the company didn’t want to “rush” them. “We chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.”

According to the memo, the impacted teams still haven’t made their final decisions on which employees to cut. The company’s goal is to make these decisions by mid to late April and notify employees from there. Affected employees will receive severance pay, transitional health insurance, and external job placement support.

The fourth quarter of 2022 was Amazon’s worst Q4 yet, with the company reporting its first net loss since 2014 at $2.7 billion for the entire year. Amazon has made a number of cost-cutting moves in recent months, including suspending the construction of its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, shuttering some of its physical Go stores, and halting the expansion of its Fresh stores. The e-commerce giant isn’t the only major company contending with financial issues and layoffs amidst a rocky economy. Meta, Microsoft, and Google have already laid off tens of thousands of workers this year.

“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,” Jassy writes.

Update March 20th, 2:48PM ET: Twitch declined to comment.