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On October 28, 2025, Amazon announced the elimination of approximately 14,000 positions from its global workforce of approximately 350,000 employees, representing approximately 4% of that segment.
This marks the company’s largest round of corporate layoffs since 2022-2023, when it eliminated 27,000 jobs. The move is part of ongoing efforts to “reduce bureaucracy, eliminate layers, and redirect resources” toward priority areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and generative technologies. Affected employees were notified by email that morning, and many learned of their layoffs through their personal inboxes.
The company emphasized that this includes both reductions in some areas and hiring in others, but the net effect is a significant reduction in staff. More cuts are expected in 2026, potentially bringing the total to 30,000. Impacts
The layoffs span virtually every corporate function, including human resources (People Experience and Technology), operations, devices and services, Amazon Web Services (AWS), gaming, food, sustainability, communications, and advertising.
While their scope is global, they are expected to hit Amazon’s Seattle headquarters region hardest, where the majority of its corporate workforce is concentrated.
In the UK, where Amazon employs around 75,000 people, unions like GMB have warned of the inevitable impact on local workers, compounding uncertainty amid the company’s strict five-day return-to-office policy.
The repercussions for the sector are evident, as this is the largest layoff in the tech sector by 2025 to date, contributing to more than 98,000 tech job cuts this year across more than 200 companies.
This highlights a trend in which AI’s efficiency is displacing middle and management positions. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had previously noted that generative AI would require “fewer people doing some of the jobs being done today.”
Reactions on social media highlight the emotional impact, with critics decrying job insecurity brought on by AI and an Indian entrepreneur urging recent graduates to temper their enthusiasm for job placement, given the magnitude of the losses.
The 14,000 affected workers are likely to suffer immediate financial hardship, many of them in high-cost areas like Seattle.
Amazon is offering severance pay (without specifying details), priority internal hiring, and HR video calls, but the sudden email notifications have drawn criticism for being impersonal.
In the long term, this could accelerate the skills transition to AI-related positions, but displaced workers face a competitive labor market amid continued downsizing in the tech sector.
Critics, including labor rights advocates, argue that this erodes job security and morale, and a post by X points out the irony of recent campus hires celebrating the offers.
The cuts seek to streamline operations following the hiring boom during the pandemic, freeing up resources to invest in AI: Amazon invested billions in generative AI by 2025.
This could boost efficiency and stock performance ahead of its third-quarter results on October 31, but risks include talent loss (key innovators could leave for competitors) and a cultural backlash from repeated layoffs.
The return-to-office mandate, intended to incentivize voluntary departures, apparently fell short of its goals, forcing these forced reductions.
At the macro level, this intensifies concerns about AI’s role in structural unemployment, especially in white-collar sectors.
It contributes to a surge in layoffs in the tech sector in 2025, which could dampen wage growth and consumer spending in tech hubs.
Broader sectors (e.g., banking and retail) are following suit, with Goldman Sachs and Target citing similar AI efficiencies to justify their cuts. In regions like the UK and India, it’s fueling debate about worker protections and the ethics of AI adoption.
Amazon’s elimination of 14,000 jobs signals a crucial shift in the evolution of Big Tech. AI is no longer just a tool, but a key driver of workforce redesign, prioritizing agility over scale.
While the company sees this as essential to competing in an AI-first era, as Meta, Microsoft, and Google have done, it highlights a harsh reality for employees: Rapid technological advances often come at the expense of human roles.
For Amazon, success depends on the effective redeployment of talent to prevent innovation from being stifled; failure could erode its competitive advantage.
At the societal level, this underscores the urgent need for retraining programs and policy interventions to mitigate the disruptive force of AI, to prevent mass layoffs from becoming the new normal in knowledge economies.
As Jassy warned, “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet,” but a transformation without equity risks deepening inequality.
