Amazon Lays Off Hundreds

The layoffs have hit. In a sad day, Amazon has announced plans for laying off hundreds of employees, as the company doubles up focus on certain areas of the business.

This rare cutback was reported by the Seattle Times.

Apparently, the number of employees that have been handed the pink slip total in the low hundreds, primarily in the consumer retail side of the business. The company has said that this is part of its efforts to shift head count allocation to business that are growing.

Say, Alexa, and the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed in a statement:

“As part of our annual planning process, we are making head count adjustments across the company — small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive hiring in many others. For affected employees, we work to find roles in the areas where we are hiring.”

Hmmm.

Amazon’s workforce comes in at 566,000 people currently, and the company has 12,500 opens job listing as of this writing, beyond roles in warehouses.

But these layoffs are part of the recent moves that Amazon has been making as it pivots away from consumer retail. CEO Jeff Bezos outlined this strategy during the company’s quarterly earnings report earlier this month.

A strategy that has AWS continue to be an extremely important part of its overall revenue, with the cloud arm accounting for practically all of the company’s operating profit for the year.

As for these layoffs, they are still ongoing, and expected to be completed over the coming weeks.