Amazon will cut 9,000 jobs in new wave of layoffs – 03/20/2023 – Market

Amazon.com Inc said on Monday it would cut 9,000 jobs across its cloud services, advertising and Twitch units, becoming the latest big tech to announce a second round of layoffs in the face of a possible recession.

Chief Executive Andy Jassy said the company had added a substantial amount of staff in recent years, but the uncertain economy had forced it to opt for cost and staffing cuts.

Last week, Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook, said it would cut 10,000 jobs this year, following a first wave of layoffs in the fall that eliminated more than 11,000 jobs.

Large technology companies, known as ‘big techs’, have been responsible for a wave of layoffs in recent months.

In addition to Amazon itself and Meta, the cases of Alphabet (owner of Google), Microsoft, Twitter, Salesforce, Lyft, Coinbase are recent.

According to a BBC report, which cites the tracking website Layoffs.fyi, in the technology area, companies laid off more than 150,000 employees in 2022. By mid-February of this year, they had already cut 76,000 positions.

In the opinion of some experts interviewed by The New York Times, the move is a correction of the “pandemic hiring madness”, not the bursting of a bubble.

The biggest increases in tech jobs came after the start of the pandemic, as companies rushed to meet rising demand. In 2022, the industry created nearly 260,000 jobs, according to CompTIA, the most jobs created in a single year since 2000.

The rise in technology jobs continued last year, even as large layoffs began, although it’s unclear whether that trend has carried over into this year. New job opportunities have contributed to nearly 80% of laid-off tech workers saying they found a new job within three months, according to a survey by ZipRecruiter.