Amazon plans to lay off over 30,000 corporate jobs starting today: Report

Tech giant Amazon is planning a layoff of as many as 30,000 corporate employees, starting from Tuesday, October 28, a Reuters report said, citing three individuals familiar with the matter.

To pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon is preparing for its biggest job cut since 2022, when it first started eliminating jobs. 

While these 30,000 employees represent a small percentage of the company’s 1.55 million employees worldwide, they make up nearly 10% of its almost 350,000 corporate employees.   

Cost-cutting after the pandemic

According to reports, this is part of Amazon’s broader cost-cutting strategy in the post-pandemic era, when it overhired due to rising demand. Over the last two years, it has cut smaller numbers of jobs across several departments, including devices, communications and podcasting. 

The job cuts beginning today may affect many other divisions as well, including human resources, operations, devices and services, and Amazon Web Services, the Reuters report said, citing individuals familiar with the matter. 

On Monday, managers of impacted teams were asked to undergo training to understand how to communicate with staff following email notifications that started Tuesday morning, the people said. 

CEO Andy Jassy

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who also oversaw the company’s previous largest layoffs in 2022 and 2023, is encouraging his employees to welcome the new AI-powered era.

“Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company,” said Jassy, according to Amazon’s corporate blog. 

He added that there won’t be room for everyone. “We expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” he said. 

Other layoffs

Many big companies have announced layoffs in 2025 to deal with the mass hiring conducted during the COVID-19 peak demand periods. 

India’s largest IT services firm, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), recently faced criticism from IT workers' union NITES after its headcount dropped by nearly 20,000 in the September quarter, a larger decline when compared to the publicly announced layoffs of around 12,000 employees earlier this year.