Amazon bungles Wednesday layoff plan with misfired internal email
Nearly 10 per cent of the firm’s corporate workforce to be retrenched
[SAN FRANCISCO] Amazon on Tuesday (Jan 27) appeared to have prematurely alerted Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees to layoffs planned for Wednesday morning by sending a commiseration email and team-wide meeting invitation hours early.
Reuters reported on Jan 23 that Amazon intended to lay off thousands of corporate employees starting this week. But the company has not yet informed impacted employees, nor has it confirmed the layoff plan.
The email sent on Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice-president of applied AI solutions at AWS, wrongly said that impacted employees in the US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs.
In Slack messages viewed by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said the Wednesday meeting was almost immediately cancelled. Amazon referred in the email to the layoffs as “Project Dawn”.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Aubrey wrote in the email, reviewed by Reuters. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organisation and AWS for future success.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Jobs in the company’s units covering AWS, retail, Prime Video and human resources were slated to be affected, people familiar with the matter told Reuters, though the full scope of this week’s layoffs was unclear.
Amazon laid off about 14,000 people in October last year, part of a broader plan to reduce corporate staff by around 30,000, people familiar with the matter said at the time.
The full 30,000 jobs would represent a small portion of Amazon’s 1.58 million employees, but nearly 10 per cent of the firm’s corporate workforce.
On Tuesday, Amazon cut jobs in its Fresh grocery and Go market divisions as it plans to close existing brick-and-mortar stores and convert some of them to Whole Foods stores.
Amazon tied the October job cuts to the increased use of artificial intelligence and efforts to reduce layers of bureaucracy. REUTERS
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