Employees in advertising unit impacted by fresh Amazon layoffs: report

Paul Kotas, Amazon’s senior vice president of advertising, IMDb and Grand Challenge, sent a note to staffers informing them of the layoffs, CNBC reported, citing the memo.

“We have made deeply-considered decisions about how best to move forward, resulting in role eliminations for a small percentage of our organisation,” Kotas said in his note.

Also read | Meta prepares more layoffs across Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram

The layoffs will start on June 20, or July 17 if affected workers live in New York and New Jersey, after a 60- to 90-day transition period, as per the report.

Staff will also be given an opportunity to search for another role inside the company.

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The email, however, did not specify the number of roles that would be impacted. The fresh layoffs are in addition to the 27,000 roles that the ecommerce major has already eliminated.

Amazon had in January announced that it would lay off over 18,000 employees, citing an “uncertain economy” and “rapid hiring” as reasons for the job cuts.

Last month, CEO Andy Jassy said that the tech major would slash another 9,000 jobs.

The earlier rounds of layoffs largely impacted staff in the Amazon Web Services (AWS), advertising, Twitch, Amazon Stores and People Experience and Technology Solutions (PXT Solutions) teams.

Also read | Disney is poised to eliminate thousands of jobs next week

While Jassy’s note did not mention India specifically, the etailer has shut its relatively smaller businesses in India, such as food delivery, wholesale distribution and Amazon Academy, as part of the restructuring here.

Jassy had earlier hinted at more layoffs, in a letter to shareholders. He said that the company had reprioritised where to spend resources, which ultimately led to the hard decision to eliminate 27,000 corporate roles.

“There are a number of other changes that we’ve made over the last several months to streamline our overall costs, and like most leadership teams, we’ll continue to evaluate what we’re seeing in our business and proceed adaptively,” the Amazon CEO wrote.

The layoff announcement is in line with the approach followed by the majority of tech companies, which have resorted to job cuts to reduce expenses in the face of inflation and rising interest rates.

Meanwhile, Meta is also planning more layoffs after cutting about 13% of its workforce, or about 11,000 jobs, in November.

Bloomberg reported that Facebook’s parent company has notified managers to prepare to announce job cuts on Wednesday.

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Reality Labs — which houses the firm’s virtual reality efforts and Quest hardware — will all be impacted, as per the report. The move is part of a cost-cutting push that will eventually do away with 10,000 positions at the company, as announced by cofounder Mark Zuckerberg in March.