Amazon, the e-commerce leader, began a second wave of layoffs that is hitting states like New York, California and Washington.
The second wave of layoffs has hit Amazon. This time, the most affected states are New York, California and Washington, places where more than 3,000 employees have received notification that their position was terminated.
According to the local press in the three states, the employees who will leave the company led by Jeff Bezos, were notified of this second wave of layoffs since last week. This situation occurs after several weeks ago, Amazon confirmed that it would lay off more than 18,000 of its employees.
According to a MarketWatch report, about 2,320 employees had lost their jobs in Seattle and Bellevue, Washington. The law requires job cut notices to be filed in the three aforementioned states several weeks in advance.
In early 2023, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive and Bezos’s successor, had said the company was going to cut a total of 18,000 jobs worldwide. Last November, in 2022, it had been announced that they would lay off 10,000 people.
Jassy cited an “uncertain economy and we’ve been hiring fast in recent years” as the reasons for the layoffs. Some of the vacancies affected in this second wave of cuts belong to software engineers, programming managers, scientists, researchers, recruiters, among others.
Amazon is one more company to join the list of companies in the technology industry that are making massive cuts. A few days ago, Microsoft announced that it would lay off 6% of its workforce worldwide. That same week, the company 3M and Spotify have announced the same. Google has been one of the last to join this wave of layoffs.
According to various experts, this is the largest cut in the history of Amazon, which was founded in 1994 in Bellevue, Washington. Amazon did a lot of hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic: in 2021 they increased their workforce by more than 1.6 million.