How Amazon's 16,000 Job Cuts Align With Firm Restructuring

Amazon has confirmed plans to cut 16,000 jobs as part of its organisational restructuring, affecting employees across multiple regions including the US, Canada and Costa Rica.

Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, addressed the cuts in a blog post on Amazon News. "I recognise this is difficult news, which is why I am sharing what is happening and why," Beth writes.

"As I shared in October, we have been working to strengthen our organisation by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy. While many teams finalised their organisational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now."

Beth confirmed that Amazon is working with the 16,000 affected employees to "support everyone whose role is impacted".

Communication about the redundancies

Prior to the official announcement, employees received indication of the cuts through an email draft from Colleen Aubrey, a Senior Vice President at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which appeared as part of a calendar invitation sent to Amazon workers on 27 January. This invitation was removed shortly after.

According to the BBC, the invitation was titled "Send Project Dawn email", which is a term the firm is reported to use to reference job cuts.

"This is a continuation of the work we have been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for companies," the email says, according to the BBC.

The message acknowledged the impact on staff: "Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organisation and AWS for future success."

The reasoning behind workforce changes

These cuts follow an earlier round of 14,000 job reductions announced in October 2024.

At the firm's quarter earnings call on 30 October, CEO Andy Jassy addressed the decision, stating it was not based on financial grounds.

"The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven and it is not even really artificial intelligence (AI) driven, not right now," Andy says, attributing the cuts to organisational culture instead.

Andy explains the rationale: "You end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers. Sometimes without realising it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the two-way door decisions."

Return to office requirements

The workforce reductions coincide with broader changes to working arrangements at Amazon.

In late 2024, Andy issued a memo requiring corporate staff to return to the office full-time, ending the company's previous hybrid work policy.

The CEO has positioned these changes as necessary for Amazon to operate like "the world's largest startup", an approach he says demands "a mix of constant invention, high ownership, strong urgency and shared commitment" and aims to "increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers, improve innovation and deepen collaboration" by flattening the organisation.

In his 2024 letter to shareholders, Andy emphasised the importance of pace in decision making: "Speed is a leadership decision. The leadership team has to believe it is a priority, reinforce it constantly, organise and remove structural barriers and build in modular ways that enable pace.

"But speed does not happen unless the entire company and culture embrace it."

The 16,000 job cuts represent a continuation of Amazon's efforts to restructure its workforce and reduce management layers across the organisation, with affected employees now facing transition as the company implements these changes.