Within hours of the layoffs beginning, employees started posting on LinkedIn and anonymous workplace app Blind to say they had been cut and were looking for new jobs. Some affected employees were given 60 days to find other internal jobs before they had to leave the company.
Inside Amazon, employees say they have been told little about the layoffs — they have not received any companywide communication or notices, said two corporate workers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The cuts will mostly affect areas such as retail, human resources and devices. Earlier this month, Amazon announced a broad hiring freeze among its white-collar workforce that would last at least “the next few months.”
The cuts are expected to be the e-commerce giant’s largest round of layoffs in its history, marking a big turnaround for the company which has hired aggressively over the last decade.
Amazon is expected to continue hiring in its warehouses, where it is adding staff to support its busy holiday season.
Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In recent weeks, Twitter, Salesforce, Facebook parent Meta, and other technology companies have announced significant layoffs or hiring freezes, following months of warning signs, such as tech start-ups finding it harder to raise capital.
Dan Ives, a financial analyst with Wedbush Securities, told The Washington Post on Monday that the layoffs may signal an imminent recession. Tech companies, he said, “got significantly bloated, and they’re not built for a softer economy like we’re seeing.”
Meta cut 11,000 jobs, or 13 percent of its workforce last week. Ride-hailing service Lyft also shed 13 percent of its staff. Fintech firm Stripe and real estate marketplace Zillow have also announced layoffs since October.
Earlier this month, Twitter CEO Elon Musk cut half his company’s staff shortly after acquiring the social network.
Mass layoffs represent a sharp reversal for Amazon, which has been expanding for much of its history. At the end of September, it employed more than 1.5 million workers, a 5 percent increase from the year before. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)
Amazon saw huge growth during the coronavirus crisis as people spent more time at home and increasingly did their shopping online. In May, the company acknowledged that it had staffed up too quickly at its warehouses to keep pace with…
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