Amazon to sack 9,000 more workers in second round of layoffs

E-commerce company Amazon plans to lay off around 9,000 employees, following previously announced layoffs.

The cuts mark the second largest round of layoffs in Amazon's history, adding to the 18,000 employees the company said it would lay off in January.

"The second phase of the company's annual planning process - which determined what areas of the business to trim - completed this month and led to the additional job cuts," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees.

He said Amazon will still hire in some strategic areas.

"Some may ask why we didn't announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we've made them so people had the information as soon as possible," Jassy said.

The CEO justified the decision saying the company's internal businesses evaluated what customers most care about and made "re-prioritization decisions" that sometimes led to role reductions, moving people from one initiative to another, and to new openings.

"This initially led us to eliminate 18,000 positions (which we shared in January); and, as we completed the second phase of our planning this month, it led us to these additional 9,000 role reductions," he said, adding that "you will see limited hiring in some of our businesses in strategic areas where we've prioritized allocating more resources."

The development comes just months after Amazon in January this year, said it will lay off over 18,000 employees, amid a rush of other tech companies downsizing their head count.

Meanwhile, Facebook-parent Meta Platforms said on Tuesday it would lay off 10,000 jobs in a second round of mass layoffs. The fresh layoff is in addition to the 11,000 employees or 13% of its global workforce Meta had sacked in November last year in a bid to cut costs.