Amazon AWS: Amazon follows tech industry with new round of layoffs

Amazon is the latest tech company to make big layoffs. The giant is making around 10,000 cuts to employees in corporate and technology roles, in what the New York Times has determined represents about 3% of its corporate staff. More broadly, the cuts represent less than 1% of the global workforce - which by September exceeded 1.5 million people - 5% up from last year. 

Similar to the wider tech cuts across the industry, these layoffs are likely to impact its devices, retail and human-resources teams. Speaking about what this means in the context of the current economic climate, Dan Ives, a financial analyst with Wedbush Securities, said to the Washington Post: “The clock has struck midnight on hypergrowth for big tech.” Further to this, Ives commented that these big cuts mean that “a recession is on the doorstep.”

This news follows an announcement made by Amazon back in August that, going forward, it intends to spend more money on data centers, with CFO Brian Olsavsky commenting: “We expect [technology] infrastructure to represent a bit more than half of our total capital investments in 2022. We expect the fulfillment and transportation dollars spent on capital projects to be lower in 2022 versus the prior year.”