Amazon just pulled the trigger on another round of massive job cuts, and this time 16,000 people are getting pink slips. This comes barely three months after the company laid off 14,000 workers in October. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s 30,000 jobs gone in a single quarter.
Beth Galetti, the Senior VP of people experience and technology, tried to soften the blow in her letter to employees. She threw around the usual corporate speak about “reducing layers” and “increasing ownership” and “removing bureaucracy.” Translation? Teams couldn’t get their act together during the first round of cuts, so here we are again.
The timing couldn’t be more awkward. Amazon is sitting on a workforce of 1.57 million people as of last October, and they’re about to publish Q4 2025 results next week. Nothing says “great quarter ahead” quite like announcing you’re dumping 16,000 employees.
The AI Elephant in the Room
Here’s where things get interesting. CEO Andy Jassy wrote a memo last year that basically said AI is going to make a bunch of current jobs obsolete. He was pretty blunt about it, saying they’ll need fewer people doing today’s jobs and more people doing “other types of jobs.” Whatever that means.
This isn’t just about cutting costs. Amazon is reshaping itself for an AI-first future, and apparently that future doesn’t include tens of thousands of current employees. The corporate workforce is going to shrink over the next few years, according to Jassy’s own words.
The “Project Dawn” Mystery
Things got weird when Amazon accidentally sent a meeting invite to AWS employees about job cuts and something called “Project Dawn.” The invite got canceled fast, but not before it confused a bunch of workers and got picked up by Business Insider. Nothing creates workplace anxiety quite like mysterious project codenames tied to layoffs.
Galetti tried to reassure everyone that this isn’t going to become a quarterly ritual. She said they’re not planning to announce “broad reductions every few months.” But then she added that caveat about how teams will “continue to evaluate” and “make adjustments as appropriate.” So basically, don’t get too comfortable.
Retail Retreat
The job cuts aren’t happening in a vacuum. Amazon just announced it’s shutting down its physical Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores to focus on same-day grocery delivery. They’re putting their chips on Whole Foods instead, planning to open 100 new stores over the next few years.
It’s a full retreat from their experimental retail push. Those cashierless Go stores were supposed to be the future of shopping. Turns out the future is just delivering groceries really fast and banking on the premium business model that Whole Foods represents.
The company insists it will keep hiring in “strategic areas,” which is corporate code for “if you work in AI or AWS, you’re probably fine.” Everyone else should probably update their LinkedIn profiles.
What’s striking is how normalized these massive layoffs have become in the tech industry, where companies with billions in revenue treat tens of thousands of jobs as line items to be optimized rather than people whose livelihoods are being upended.
