Amazon to Cut 30,000 Office Jobs: Media Reports

AFP/APP

San Francisco: Amazon plans to lay off tens of thousands of office workers as the e-commerce and technology giant seeks to trim costs while ramping up investments in artificial intelligence (AI), according to US media reports.

Multiple outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, reported that about 30,000 positions will be cut starting Tuesday — nearly 10 percent of Amazon’s roughly 350,000 office staff.

The reported layoffs will not affect Amazon’s vast distribution and warehouse workforce, which makes up the majority of the company’s 1.5 million employees.

Seattle-based Amazon declined to comment on the reports when contacted by AFP.

Shares of Amazon ended slightly higher on Monday as news of the potential cost-cutting spread.

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy has repeatedly emphasized the company’s focus on AI, saying it will transform operations across all business areas — from customer engagement to workplace efficiency.

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“Our conviction that AI will change every customer experience is starting to play out,” Jassy said during Amazon’s most recent quarterly earnings call.

The company is scheduled to announce its next earnings report on Thursday, amid growing investor pressure to demonstrate the payoff of its massive AI investments.

“AWS will be under pressure to both show revenue acceleration and operating margin improvement in light of its massive AI investments,” said Sky Canaves, principal analyst at Emarketer, referring to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing division.

Amazon is also expected to face questions regarding a recent AWS outage, which disrupted major internet services worldwide last week.

Streaming platforms including Amazon Prime Video and Disney+, as well as Perplexity AI, Fortnite, Airbnb, Snapchat, and Duolingo, were affected. Messaging services such as Signal and WhatsApp also experienced issues in Europe, according to Downdetector.

Some banks, including Lloyd’s, cited Amazon’s cloud infrastructure as the source of the problem. Amazon later said it had identified the cause as a Domain Name System (DNS) issue — the internet’s address system that directs data traffic.

AWS remains the global leader in cloud computing, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, supporting businesses, governments, and consumers worldwide for essential online services.