Amazon Plans Large Layoffs, in Bid to Reduce Overstaffing

Amazon is getting ready to cut up to 30,000 corporate jobs, people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in what would be one of the largest mass layoffs ever announced by the company. If completed, the move would impact about 2 percent of Amazon’s global workforce and highlight a broader, continuing reset across Big Tech following years of breakneck hiring.

What We Know So Far About Amazon’s Planned Layoffs

The cuts, which could start as soon as this week, would be centered on corporate staff rather than warehouse workers, according to multiple sources who spoke with Reuters. The scale surpasses Amazon’s previous round of nearly 27,000 corporate job cuts that it made from late 2022 through early 2023, a downsizing that came after an industrywide post-pandemic reality check.

Amazon has around 1.5 million employees globally and is one of the biggest private employers in the U.S. The company grew at a breakneck pace through 2020, adding an estimated 427,300 employees between January and October as e-commerce volume soared.

Why Amazon Is Cutting Now and Refocusing Resources

The announced reductions reflect a strategic effort to right-size after pandemic-era overhiring as well as reallocate resources toward higher-return opportunities. Amazon’s growth engine is still AWS, and advertising has emerged as a meaningful profit contributor. At the same time, aggressive investing in logistics, data centers, and AI infrastructure, which are all capital-intensive endeavors, has increased the performance bar for lower-margin parts of the business.

Cost discipline, which started in 2022, has continued throughout tech. Industry trackers have cataloged hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs in the last two years as companies adjust staff to suit more normalized demand and as capital grows more expensive.

Who Could Be Affected Across Amazon’s Corporate Units

It’s unclear which business units will be hit hardest. (Read more: Amazon may cut up to 15% of jobs at its headquarters.) Fortune previously reported that Amazon was considering cuts of as much as 15% in some areas of its wide-reaching human resources group, which employs over 10,000 people across the planet. In earlier rounds, jobs in its devices, retail, and recruiting businesses were particularly hard hit as the company cut back on experimentation and hiring pipelines.

Amazon has offered little public verbiage about the round, but internal priorities — rolling out logistics optimization tech on a near-automated basis instead of ad hoc in industry skunkworks, AI-driven personalization, a focus on cash gain and “high priority” new FCF this year, and getting microservices back-ended in all parts of the store with an emphasis on consumer experiments to pay for that architecture work (yes, loss taken now; build financials later via tax-free exchanges) — suggest that support and redundant corporate roles would again be likely candidates.

Frontline Work Under Threat from Automation

While the most recent cuts are to corporate positions, frontline operations continue to change, several people familiar with the new plans said. The New York Times recently reported on internal conversations being held at Amazon on whether it could automate up to 75% of its warehousing business and then potentially eliminate over half a million jobs eventually. Amazon disputed the characterization, with spokeswoman Kelly Nantel saying the documents represent a view of just one team and not the hiring strategy across the company.

Still, the trend is evident: Robotics and AI are on their way from pilots to production. Amazon has been adding pick robots, sorters, palletizers, and vision systems steadily in order to improve throughput and safety — one of many recent changes that transform job design toward maintenance, exception handling, and human-robot coordination.

Labor Relations Under Scrutiny Amid Ongoing Disputes

Amazon’s stance on labor continues to attract scrutiny from regulators and unions. Amazon has been found to be a joint employer with certain subcontractors, the board has ruled in multiple cases; the company disputes this. More than 150 unionized delivery drivers in New York were fired earlier this year amid a dispute that unions described as retribution for work stoppages — an accusation Amazon denies.

The pressure comes on the heels of the 2022 union win at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, where litigation and appeals continue to grind on. A new wave of corporate cuts will only serve to further sharpen attention on how the company strikes a balance between controlling its costs and fulfilling an obligation it has as one of the most valuable businesses in history to workers throughout its ecosystem.

Seasonal Hires Will Not Compensate for Structural Cuts

Amazon has said it expects to hire 250,000 seasonal workers for the holiday rush, a figure in keeping with its peak-season hiring in recent years. Those positions, though, are temporary by design and will not offset the loss of institutional memory on teams, projects, and even within entire companies.

For investors, the near-term impact could be a slimmer cost base and better operating leverage. For employees, it heralds a more discriminating Amazon — one emphasizing scale efficiencies, automation, and high-margin bets while exhibiting substantially less patience for projects that do not have a clearly discernible path to paying off.

What to Watch Next as Amazon Confirms Details and Impact

Getting a confirmation of the layoffs and clarity on which divisions were affected will be important, as well as details on severance and possible hiring freezes in related divisions. Its leadership’s statements and news reports, from Reuters to The New York Times to industry analysts, will provide the best read on how this is all reshaping headcount, execution priorities, and the broader tech labor market as we head into the next earnings cycle.