Amazon announces it will lay off 9,000 more workers

In total, the company led by Jeff Bezos will lay off 27,000 employees. Among the most affected areas are Twitch and advertising.

Amazon announced it will lay off 9,000 more workers over the next few weeks. In total, the Jeff Bezos-led company will shed 27,000 employees since it began cutting jobs in November 2022.

The company's CEO Andy Jassy broke the news to employees in a memo in which he assured that the most affected areas would be Amazon Web Services, People Experience and Technology (PXT), advertising and Twitch: "This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term."

The main cause: economic uncertainty

The new layoffs follow the company's announcement in November that it would would lay off 18,000 workers, which were motivated by the uncertainty facing the sector after the tech bubble burst: "Given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount," Jassy said in the statement.

The letter also explained why the decision was made now and not before, when the first round of layoffs began. According to Amazon's CEO, this decision was made because not all teams had undergone a year-end analysis, which prevented them from assessing which teams needed to restructure and which did not:

Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.