Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Within hours of the layoffs beginning, employees began posting on LinkedIn and the anonymous workplace app Blind to say they had been laid off and were looking for new jobs.
The cuts will mostly affect areas such as retail, human resources and hardware. Earlier this month, Amazon announced a broad hiring freeze among its white-collar workforce that will last at least the “next few months.”
The cuts are expected to be the largest round of layoffs for the e-commerce giant in its history, marking a major turnaround for the company that has hired aggressively over the past decade.
Amazon is expected to continue hiring for its warehouses, as it adds staff to support its busy holiday season.
In recent weeks, Twitter, Salesforce, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies have announced slews of layoffs or hiring freezes, following months of warning signs such as tech startups. You find it difficult to raise capital.
Dan Ives, a financial analyst at Wedbush Securities, told The Washington Post Monday that the layoffs could signal an imminent recession. He said the tech companies were “inflated so big, they weren’t built for a softer economy like we’re seeing now.”
Mita cut 11,000 jobs, or 13 percent of its workforce, last week. The ride-hailing service Lyft has laid off 13 percent of its employees. Financial technology company Stripe and real estate marketplace Zillow have also announced layoffs since October.
Earlier this month, Twitter CEO Elon Musk He cut half of his company’s employees Soon after the acquisition of the social network.
The mass layoffs are a sharp reversal for Amazon, which has been expanding for most of its history. At the end of September, it employed more than 1.5 million workers, up 5 percent from the previous year. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
Amazon experienced explosive growth during the coronavirus crisis as people spent more time at home and increasingly shopped online. In May, the company admitted that it had staffed its warehouse too quickly to keep up with demand, which by then was cooling.
Moreover, in the face of soaring inflation and increasingly budget-conscious consumers, Amazon issued disappointing forecasts for the holiday season — usually its strongest time of the year — Its stock fell last month. Amazon Stock decreased Up nearly 39 percent since the start of the year, despite the market cap still exceeding $1 trillion.
Mandy Dean, 39, was a contract employee in Chicago with Amazon Luna, the company’s cloud gaming platform. The company let her contract expire in September, though she said she was on her way to an interview for a full-time job.
It wasn’t a complete surprise since Dean said she saw the streamers in August, as the software engineer slots she was tasked with filling dwindled.
“It was bad timing for all of this to happen,” Dean said. “I really loved working at Amazon. I loved the culture, the people I worked with, and the job itself. It was a tough situation but there was nothing I could do.”
