Amazon employees in Canada informed about layoffs via internal email ahead of time
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Amazon appears to have alerted Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees ahead of time on Tuesday to layoffs planned for Wednesday morning by sending a communication email and team-wide meeting invitation.
Reuters reported on Friday that Amazon intends to lay off thousands of corporate employees starting this week. But the company has not yet informed the affected employees nor confirmed the layoff plan.
The email sent on Tuesday, signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, incorrectly said that affected employees in the US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been notified that they had lost their jobs.
In Slack messages seen by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said Wednesday’s meeting was canceled almost immediately. Amazon called the layoffs “Project Dawn” in an email.
“Changes like this are hard for everyone,” Aubrey wrote in an email reviewed by Reuters. “These decisions are difficult and taken thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While touting the benefits of artificial intelligence as the most transformative technology since the Internet, Amazon announced it is cutting 14,000 corporate jobs. The retail giant is the latest company to cut positions while making a big investment in AI.
People familiar with the matter told Reuters that jobs at the company’s units covering AWS, retail, Prime Video and human resources were set to be affected, though the full scope of this week’s cuts was unclear.
Amazon laid off about 14,000 people in October as part of a broader plan to reduce its corporate workforce by about 30,000, people familiar with the matter said at the time.
On Tuesday, Amazon cut jobs at its Fresh Grocery and Go Market divisions as it plans to close existing brick-and-mortar stores and convert some of them into Whole Foods stores. It did not disclose the number of employees affected.
The size of the cuts to be announced Wednesday remained unclear. The full 30,000 jobs identified in October will represent a small portion of Amazon’s 1.58 million employees, but about 10 percent of the firm’s corporate workforce.
In an October blog post, Amazon linked those job cuts to its increased use of artificial intelligence. That post from human resources chief Beth Galetti indicated that more job cuts are likely in the future.
The erroneous email Tuesday referred to a blog post by Galetti, which has not yet appeared on Amazon’s website.
