Amazon announces second wave of layoffs with 9,000 more workers to go

The move will spark fears of a growing second wave of jobs cuts in the tech sector after Meta announced 10,000 layoffs last week, adding to the 11,000 workers already earmarked for redundancy at Mark Zuckerberg’s firm.

There has been no detail yet on what the latest layoff round means for Amazon’s 5,000 workers in Ireland.

The cuts will be primarily targeted at Amazon’s cloud computing operations, as well as in advertising, Twitch (video) and human resources.

“We intend to eliminate about 9,000 more positions in the next few weeks,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

“This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term.”

Mr Jassy said that the reason why the company didn’t announce the additional layoffs at the time of its first job cuts in January was that “not all of the teams were done with their analyses”.

“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,” he said.

“The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted.”

He said that the company’s goal is to have the assessment complete by late April, when it will “communicate with the impacted employees or, where applicable in Europe, with employee representative bodies”.

He added that the company will see “limited hiring in some of our businesses in strategic areas where we’ve prioritised allocating more resources”.