Amazon fires staffers via early-morning text messages during round of 14K job cuts: report

Some of the 14,000 workers Amazon began firing this week learned of their fate through an impersonal text-message blast, according to a new report.

Amazon sent affected employees two text messages early Tuesday morning as the e-commerce giant launched a round of corporate job cuts, according to people familiar with the matter and screenshots reviewed by Business Insider.

One message urged employees to check their personal and work emails before coming into the office – in an effort to prevent laid-off staffers from showing up to work and discovering their badges no longer worked, according to the report.

Just to be sure, Amazon sent a second text message directing employees to call a help desk if they had not received “an email message about your role,” Business Insider reported.

Amazon declined to comment.

Tuesday’s layoffs were the latest in Amazon’s efforts to “reduce bureaucracy” across its white-collar workforce, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s executive in charge of human resources, said in a memo to staffers. 

“While this will include reducing in some areas and hiring in others, it will mean an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles,” she stated.

Some managers were told Monday to complete training sessions on how to brief laid-off employees once the emails were sent out, sources told Reuters.

Several teams were impacted, including ones working on HR, devices, services and operations, according to the outlet.

Impacted employees will be able to look for a new role internally.

Otherwise, they will be offered severance pay, outplacement services and health benefits, according to Galetti’s memo.

In total, the Seattle-based company is reportedly planning to slash 30,000 corporate jobs – or about 9% of its global office-based workforce – over the coming weeks, sources told Reuters.

Another round of corporate cuts is expected in January, after the busy holiday shopping season, two people familiar with the matter told the New York Times.

Amazon has slashed tens of thousands of jobs since Andy Jassy took over the helm from the company’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, in 2021. 

In June, Jassy urged employees to embrace automation and “help us reinvent the company.”

He said new tech could create new job opportunities – though he also admitted it could bring “efficiency gains” by helping to reduce the overall workforce.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today,” Jassy wrote at the time.

Amazon has already embraced robots and automation in its warehouses.

The company plans to avoid hiring more than 600,000 warehouse employees in the coming years thanks to the new tech – even as it expects to sell twice as many items over the same period, according to a New York Times report. Amazon called the article “an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans.”

In its most recent quarter, Amazon reported $18 billion in profit and ramped up its spending on AI data centers. 

Capital expenses, which include data centers, are expected to push past $120 billion this year – up nearly 50% from last year. 

“Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well,” Galetti wrote in her Tuesday memo.

But “the world is changing quickly” and Amazon is focused on operating “more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership” to take advantage of AI opportunities, the exec explained.