Amazon by accident sends electronic mail confirming layoffs | EUROtoday

US know-how big Amazon has knowledgeable staff of a brand new spherical of world layoffs in an electronic mail apparently despatched in error.

A draft electronic mail written by Colleen Aubrey, a senior vice chairman at Amazon Web Services (AWS), was included as a part of a calendar invite despatched by an govt assistant to quite a lot of Amazon staff late on Tuesday.

In the e-mail, Aubrey refers to a swathe of staff within the US, Canada and Costa Rica having been laid off as a part of an effort to “strengthen the company.”

The message, which has been seen by the BBC, was apparently shared by mistake, because it was rapidly cancelled. An Amazon spokesman declined to remark.

The title of the invite was “Send project Dawn email,” an obvious reference to Amazon’s code identify for the job cuts.

While the e-mail made clear that layoffs had been occurring at Amazon, staff had not but been formally knowledgeable.

“This is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers,” the e-mail stated.

“Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success,” it added.

Amazon introduced 14,000 job cuts in late October.

This second spherical of layoffs had been anticipated by Amazon staff for weeks, in line with a former worker who requested not be recognized.

The broad understanding amongst staff had been that bosses supposed to chop a complete of round 30,000 roles, added the previous worker, who left the corporate as a part of the cuts in October.

The agency was anticipated to succeed in that variety of job cuts with one other main spherical of layoffs this month, adopted by additional redundancies till the top of May.

While laid-off staff had been invited to reapply for open positions at Amazon, the variety of such roles was restricted. People who didn’t transfer to a different position acquired severance pay based mostly on how lengthy they’d labored on the firm.

Since 2022, main tech firms like Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft and others have slashed their workforces by shedding tens of hundreds of individuals annually.

Across all the tech trade, an estimated 700,000 individuals have been laid off over the past 4 years, in line with Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts.

So far this yr, Facebook proprietor Meta has minimize extra roles, impacting a number of hundred staff. As has Pinterest, which this week minimize round 700 jobs.

Since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stood down as its chief govt 4 years in the past, his successor Andy Jassy has led the corporate by a number of rounds of layoffs in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Jassy has additionally tried to deliver a extra strict work tradition to the agency.

In-office work is now necessary five-days every week, making Amazon one of many solely main tech firms to require its staff to be within the workplace full-time.

Amazon can be centered on lowering prices, even monitoring company cell phone use by AWS staff, in line with a report in Business Insider, in an effort to restrict a long-standing $50 monthly reimbursement.

In an electronic mail Jassy despatched to staff earlier than the Thanksgiving vacation seen by the BBC, the CEO stated he was grateful for the “challenges at opportunities at work” as “the world is changing at a very rapid rate.”

Jassy known as this period at Amazon “a time to rethink everything we’ve ever done.”