16,000 jobs to be cut in latest anti-bureaucracy push
Amazon.com Inc. plans to reduce its global corporate workforce by up to 14,000 and capitalize on the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI), a pedestrian walking past Amazon Ireland corporate offices in Dublin, October 28, 2025, in Dublin, Ireland, said Tuesday.
Damien Bidders | Reuters
Amazon It plans to eliminate about 16,000 corporate jobs, it said Wednesday, marking the second round of mass layoffs since last October.
Inside a blog postThe layoffs are part of an ongoing effort to “strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership and eliminating red tape,” the company wrote. This dovetails with an effort to invest heavily in artificial intelligence.
The cuts come just months after layoffs in October, when Amazon laid off 14,000 employees in its corporate workforce. At the time, the company said the cuts would continue into 2026 as it found “additional places where we can remove the layers.”
Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of human experience and technology, didn’t rule out more layoffs in the future but said the company isn’t trying to create a “new cadence” of large-scale layoffs every few months.
“This is not our plan,” Galetti wrote. “But as we always do, each team will continue to evaluate its ownership, speed and capacity to invent for customers and make adjustments as appropriate.”
On Tuesday, some employees at Amazon’s cloud unit received an email sent with an apparent error acknowledging “organizational changes” at the company. The memo referenced a post by Galetti and said Amazon had notified “affected colleagues within our organization.”
Amazon had approximately 1.58 million employees as of the end of its third quarter. This figure consists mainly of warehouse and logistics employees.
The 30,000 layoffs since October represent about 10% of the corporate and technology workforce of approximately 350,000 people.
Amazon has been in the midst of a significant downsizing for the past few years. The company laid off more than 27,000 employees between 2022 and 2023, and made smaller cuts at several organizations in 2024.
CEO Andy Jassy has sought to reduce Amazon’s workforce after the company went on a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic, partly to meet a surge in demand for e-commerce and cloud computing services.
