Tech layoffs: Amazon starts phase 2 of job cuts, fires 9,000 employees

Following Facebook's parent Meta, e-commerce giant Amazon has become the second big tech firm to enter another round of layoffs.

The firm which had fired the most people at 18,000, has now sacked another 9,000 people in the fresh spate of job cuts.

E-commerce earnings lagging behind

After a 2 per cent drop e-commerce sales, Amazon has started another phase of layoffs to cut costs, to face an imminent recession.

The company described this as a difficult decision, but justified it citing Amazon's long-term survival.

Amidst a hiring freeze, Amazon will continue to hire people in strategic roles despite laying off thousands more.

Driving the layoff bandwagon

With this latest round, the total number of employees laid off by the e-commerce major has gone up to 27,000, making it the biggest layoff by a single tech firm.

Apart from Meta and Amazon, Twitter has been laying off people in multiple rounds as well.

Google has also been under pressure to sack more employees, ever since it laid off 12,000 staff members.

Although Amazon's e-commerce business saw a revenue dip, its overall earning went up by 9 per cent.

But citing slower growth in quarters to come, the online behemoth has planned cost-cutting for its main business. The deceleration for for its cloud services platform AWS has also been worse than expected.

Published on: Monday, March 20, 2023, 09:08 PM IST