US tech giant slashes more jobs

Amazon has confirmed new cost-cutting, saying an additional 9,000 workers will be let go after firing 18,000 employees in January

America’s Big Tech bloodletting has reached a new round of victims, with online retailing behemoth Amazon revealing that it will cut an additional 9,000 jobs just two months after announcing that 18,000 slots would be eliminated.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy disclosed the latest job cuts in a message to employees on Monday. Most of the affected positions are in the company’s AWS cloud services, its PXT Solutions business, its advertising operations and its Twitch online gaming platform.

“Given the uncertain economy in which we reside and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,” Jassy said. “The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole.” 

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The move came less than a week after Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced an additional 10,000 job cuts on top of the 11,000 positions it eliminated last November. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned of the possibility that “this new economic reality will continue for many years.”

Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Twitter and eBay also have cut thousands of jobs in recent months. US technology firms have been hit hard by rising interest rates and a slowdown in online advertising amid increasing economic uncertainty. Bank of America has predicted that the US economy will slide into recession later this year, while some economists have warned that even a global economic downturn won’t curb high inflation rates.

Nearly 140,000 US technology industry jobs have been cut so far this year, following more than 161,000 such eliminations in 2022, according to a tally by Layoffs.fyi.

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