US technology giant Amazon has confirmed it will cut 16,000 jobs, just hours after staff were alerted to a new round of global redundancies in an email that was reportedly sent in error.
The email was sent late on Tuesday and stated that employees in the US, Canada and Costa Rica had been laid off as part of efforts to “strengthen the company.”
The message was quickly withdrawn, with Amazon indicating it had been shared mistakenly.
Early on Wednesday, the company formally announced job reductions, saying they formed part of a plan to “remove bureaucracy” across the business.
Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, said on Wednesday that the company was not planning to make “broad reductions every few months,” referencing the 14,000 corporate roles cut in October.
“While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now,” she said.
Amazon employs about 1.5 million people globally, including roughly 350,000 in corporate roles.
The company has not said where the latest job losses will occur or which countries will be affected.
Project Dawn
On Tuesday, a draft email written by Colleen Aubrey, a senior vice president at Amazon Web Services (AWS), was included in a calendar invitation sent by an executive assistant to a number of Amazon employees.
The invitation was titled “Send project Dawn email,” an apparent reference to Amazon’s internal code name for the redundancy programme.
While the email confirmed that job cuts were taking place, affected staff had not yet been formally informed.
“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 email said.
“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.
The lay-offs had been expected by employees for weeks, according to a former Amazon worker who asked not to be identified.
The former employee said there was a broad understanding internally that management intended to cut around 30,000 roles in total, having left the company during a redundancy round in October.
Amazon was expected to reach that number through another major round of lay-offs this month, followed by further job cuts through to the end of May.
Affected employees were invited to apply for other open roles within Amazon, although the number of available positions was limited. Those who did not move into new roles received severance pay based on their length of service.
‘Time To Rethink’
Since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stepped down as chief executive four years ago, his successor Andy Jassy has overseen several rounds of job cuts.
Jassy has also sought to introduce a stricter workplace culture at the company.
Amazon now requires staff to work from the office five days a week, making it one of the few major technology firms to mandate full-time office attendance.
The company is also focused on reducing costs, including monitoring corporate mobile phone use by AWS employees, according to a report by Business Insider, to limit a long-standing $50 monthly reimbursement.
In an email sent to staff ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, Jassy said he was thankful for the “challenges at opportunities at work” as “the world is changing at a very rapid rate.”
He described the current period at Amazon as “a time to rethink everything we’ve ever done.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Amazon announced plans to close its remaining Amazon-branded grocery stores, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, while expanding its Whole Foods Market business.
