Amazon is gearing up for another major workforce reduction, with reports indicating that nearly 14,000 corporate jobs could be cut starting next week.
According to a Reuters report, this would mark the company’s second-largest layoff since October 2025 and push the total number of planned job eliminations to roughly 30,000, making it the biggest round of layoffs in Amazon’s 30-year history. The latest cuts are expected to be similar in scale to those announced late last year, when the e-commerce and cloud giant eliminated around 14,000 white-collar positions. Sources cited by Reuters suggest that teams across Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail, Prime Video, and the human resources arm, internally known as People Experience and Technology (PXT), could once again be affected. From AI Disruption To Cultural Reset When Amazon announced layoffs in October, the company initially framed the move as part of a broader shift driven by artificial intelligence. However, CEO Andy Jassy later offered a different explanation during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “It’s not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven. It’s culture,” Jassy said, highlighting what he described as excessive bureaucracy and internal complexity. This change in messaging has drawn attention from analysts, who see it as evidence of Amazon’s struggle to articulate its long-term restructuring plan clearly. In an earlier memo, the company had described AI as “the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet,” implying that automation and faster innovation were reshaping internal roles. Jassy’s later comments, however, reframed the layoffs as an attempt to strip away management layers and revive a more agile, startup-style operating model. Job Cuts Despite Strong Performance The upcoming reductions would account for close to 10 per cent of Amazon’s corporate workforce of about 350,000 employees. Still, they represent less than 2 per cent of the company’s total global headcount of approximately 1.58 million, most of whom work in warehouses and fulfilment centres. Addressing concerns internally, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of PXT, acknowledged the contradiction of cutting jobs while the business remains profitable, as per the report. “Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well,” she wrote, adding that long-term competitiveness depends on being “organised more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership.” Support Measures And Broader Changes Employees affected by the October layoffs were given a 90-day window to apply for internal roles or look for opportunities elsewhere, a deadline that expires Monday. Amazon is expected to offer similar assistance this time, including severance packages, career transition support, and extended healthcare coverage. Beyond layoffs, Jassy has rolled out additional measures to streamline operations. These include an anonymous feedback system that has generated more than 1,500 responses and led to over 450 process changes. The CEO has also enforced a strict five-day return-to-office policy, one of the toughest in the tech sector, though sources told Reuters it has not resulted in the level of voluntary exits the company had anticipated.
