Amazon has confirmed it has laid off a number of its workers in its Amazon Web Services business. GeekWire reports, via unnamed sources, that the cuts will affect hundreds of employees in the sales, marketing, and global services divisions of AWS. More job cuts will also be made in the AWS physical store division.
In a statement, a spokesperson for AWS stated that the company has "identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline in order to continue focusing our efforts on the key strategic areas that we believe will deliver maximum impact.”
Even with these layoffs, GeekWire reports that AWS still has a large number of open jobs, and it's very possible some of the people who were laid off today could be rehired in some of those open positions in the future.
AWS remains one of Amazon's biggest revenue and profit generators. In the fourth quarter of 2023, AWS had revenues of $24.2 billion and profits of $7.2 billion. However, its overall share of the cloud computing business has gone down, thanks in part to competition from Microsoft's Azure division and Google's cloud business.
The layoffs at the physical store division of AWS were revealed a day after the Amazon Fresh grocery stores announced it would be removing the technology that allowed shoppers to pay for their items and leave without having to deal with a human cashier or even a self-checkout line.
These latest layoffs from Amazon come just a few months after the company cut hundreds of jobs from its Twitch, Prime Video, and MGM divisions in early January. However, these latest cuts are far lower than the ones Amazon announced last year, when it cut 18,000 of its employees in January 2023, followed by another 9,000 members of its work force in March 2023.
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