Amazon laying off 16,000 corporate employees
Job cuts continue at Amazon.
Following recent media reports indicating it would reduce approximately 14,000 positions, Amazon announced in a corporate blog post that it is eliminating roughly 16,000 positions across the company.
"As I shared in October, we've been working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy," Beth Galetti, senior VP of people experience and technology at Amazon, said in the blog post. "While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now."
In October 2025, Amazon laid off roughly 14,000 corporate employees as part of what Reuters reported was a larger initiative to reduce expenses and rectify excessive increases in staffing levels it made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Combined with the October staff reductions, the latest layoffs represent close to 10% of Amazon’s roughly 350,000-person corporate workforce.
"Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm – where we announce broad reductions every few months," Galetti said in the blog post. "That’s not our plan. But just as we always have, every team will continue to evaluate the ownership, speed, and capacity to invent for customers, and make adjustments as appropriate."
Galetti did not specific which departments are being affected by layoffs, but Reuters previously reported cuts would occur across business units including Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video and HR. According to CNBC, on Tuesday, Jan. 27, Amazon accidentally emailed some employees in its cloud division notifying them of job cuts.
Most U.S.-based employees who are laid off will be given 90 days to look for a new role internally, with different timing internationally based on local and country-level requirements. Amazon will provide transition support including severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits as applicable for workers who are unable to find a new role at Amazon or who choose not to look for one.
"While we’re making these changes, we’ll also continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future," said Galetti. "We’re still in the early stages of building every one of our businesses and there’s significant opportunity ahead."
This latest round of layoffs follows media coverage of Amazon expecting that increasing usage of robots could enable to it replace more than 500,000 U.S. human employees and avoid having to bring on another 160,000 workers by 2027. Amazon has publicly denied those reports.
[READ MORE: Amazon reportedly plans to replace 600,000 workers with robots]
In addition, in a June 2025 message to employees which was posted on the Amazon corporate blog, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy discussed how the company sees generative AI and agentic AI as transformative technologies which will allow the company to reduce its corporate workforce. Jassy did not specify how many employees could have their jobs eliminated in the message.
Amazon brought on 250,000 seasonal holiday workers for the third straight year during the 2025 holiday season. However, the company has been reducing corporate headcount for the past few years, including the layoff of roughly 200 employees from its North America stores group, which includes the Fashion and Fitness offering, in January 2025.
These actions have also included cutting hundreds of positions across several divisions of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit in April 2024, as well as reportedly reducing headcount by less than 5% at the unit responsible for its Buy with Prime service in January 2024.
That same month, the company eliminated several hundred roles across the Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios organization, and also laid off "just over 500 people" across its Twitch gaming streaming platform.
