By early 2026, Amazon will have cut about 14,000 corporate jobs, the biggest single round of managerial cuts in the company’s history. After an initial report in The Wall Street Journal, company spokespeople confirmed that the cuts would affect middle-management positions that grew during the hiring boom during the pandemic. These jobs make up about 8% of Amazon’s 175,000 employees around the world, so warehouse workers, delivery drivers, and other front-line workers are not affected.
Andy Jassy, the CEO, is pushing for the company to run more smoothly and bring back the “frugality” he has been promoting since he took over from Jeff Bezos in 2021. In an internal memo, Jassy said that the company had found too many levels of oversight and wanted to change the manager-to-employee ratio from 1:9 to 1:15. Amazon is expected to save between $2.5 billion and $3 billion a year from the restructuring.
Before the pandemic, Amazon had 800,000 employees around the world. By 2022, that number had grown to more than 1.6 million. The rise was due to huge growth in e-commerce, cloud computing, advertising, and logistics. Now that revenue growth has slowed from triple-digit pandemic levels to the mid-teens, Jassy has said that the time of uncontrolled growth is over.
The cuts come after 9,000 job cuts were announced in March and are in line with cost-cutting moves across Big Tech. In 2022 and 2023, Meta, Google, and Microsoft all let go of tens of thousands of workers. Amazon, on the other hand, calls its actions “organizational flattening” instead of “direct replacement by artificial intelligence,” even though it is using AI tools in ad tech and supply chain management.
Employees who are laid off will get at least 60 days of pay and benefits, plus 16 weeks’ worth of severance pay and an extra week for each year they worked. There is also help for people who want to change careers. The Seattle and Bellevue headquarters will see the biggest cuts, with the AWS sales and marketing, advertising technology, and human resources teams being hit the hardest.
The news was good for investors, and Amazon shares rose 2.3% in after-hours trading. The stock is up 28% this year, thanks to a 19% rise in AWS revenue in the third quarter. Analysts think the restructuring will help Amazon’s profit margins and make it easier for the company to make decisions quickly and efficiently.
The layoffs are the end of a three-year shift from hiring people because of the pandemic to being more disciplined and efficient. Amazon hopes that the overhaul will be mostly finished by the first quarter of 2026. This will pave the way for what Jassy calls “the next phase of innovation with fewer layers and greater speed.” People inside and outside the company are still arguing about whether the cuts will keep important skills or get rid of too many.
