Amazon job cuts 2026: Etailer to start cutting thousands of corporate roles in coming days
Amazon is preparing for a second round of layoffs next week as part of its broader goal of trimming some 30,000 corporate workers.
The world’s largest etailer had trimmed about 14,000 white-collar positions in October as part of this exercise, its biggest yet.
The upcoming layoffs could reportedly begin as soon as Tuesday. This will impact Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail, Prime Video, and the People Experience and Technology (PXT) units, though the exact scope is unclear.
The cull will affect only a fraction of the company’s 1.58 million total employees but is still a major reduction in its office ranks. Most of Amazon’s staff globally work in fulfillment centres and warehouses.
During the October round, the company allowed laidoff employees to be on payroll for 90 days to apply for internal roles or seek opportunities outside. That period expires Monday, a day before the new cuts are expected to begin.
This also comes weeks after Meta Platforms began cutting more than 1,000 jobs from its Reality Labs division, part of a plan to redirect resources from virtual reality and metaverse products toward AI wearables and phone features.
Layoffs and AI efficiency
Seattle-headquartered Amazon tied the October round of job cuts to the rise of artificial intelligence software, saying in an internal letter that “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before”.
However, CEO Andy Jassy had later played down the idea that the job cuts were primarily AI-driven. “The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven,” Jassy told analysts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “It really — it’s culture.”
Jassy said Amazon had developed too many layers of management and bureaucracy over time. “You end up with a lot more people than you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers,” he said.
Impact in India
In India, between 800 and 1,000 corporate roles across finance, marketing, HR, and technology were affected in the previous round, ET reported.
Amit Agarwal, Amazon’s country head for India, had told ET that the reshaping aligns with the online retailer’s long-term vision. “We want to be the biggest startup, and that matters even more in an AI-driven world,” Agarwal said. “The workforce reductions are primarily about removing those layers… we’ll continue to do that because we want to stay lean and move like a startup.”
