Amazon is set to fire up to 10,000 workers, making the e-commerce powerhouse the most recent digital titan to implement a major redundancy plan.
This includes seasonal workers who are hired at times of high activity like the holidays, this would equal just under one percent of the group’s overall payroll, which at the end of September had 1.54 million employees worldwide.
The affected roles, according to reports, will be found in Amazon’s gadget department, retail division, and human resources.
The overall number of layoffs could alter, but if confirmed, it would represent the biggest firing spree in the 28-year-old company that Jeff Bezos created.
The hiring drive would be followed by the layoffs. Amazon doubled its workforce from the first quarter of 2020 to 1.62 million employees two years later as a result of the coronavirus pandemic’s boom in business and cooped-up people’s fervent turn to online shopping.
However, due to the weakening economy, Amazon issued a hiring block two weeks ago, and its headcount has already shrunk since the start of the year.
The parent company of Facebook, Meta, said last week that it will be eliminating 11,000 positions, or around 13 percent of its workforce.
Both the car-hailing service Lyft and the online payment company Stripe recently announced significant layoffs. About half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees were let go earlier this month after Elon Musk recently acquired the company.