• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, March 21, 2023

Amazon will lay off 9,000 workers in addition to the 18,000 that were laid off between November 2022 and January. 

CEO Andy Jassy announced the news to staff in a memo on Monday.

Advertising, along with cloud computing, human resources and the Twitch business, will be most impacted, Jassy said.

“For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount,” Jassy wrote. “This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount. The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole.”

Amazon went on a hiring spree when the pandemic drove ecommerce to new levels. Its total worldwide workforce rose from 798,000 in Q4 2019 to more than 1.6 million by year-end 2021.

Q4 2022 was the company's worst Q4 in its history, with its first net loss, of $2.7 billion, since 2014.

In recent times, Amazon has suspended construction of its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, stopped expansion of its Fresh stores and curtailed warehouse expansion, closed some of its Go stores, and dropped some experimental initiatives.

Nevertheless, Jazzy said he's "very optimistic" about Amazon's largest businesses, including Stores as well as Amazon Web Services and "newer customer experiences."

In his own message to employees, new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said that about 400 people in that segment will be laid off. Amid economic pressures, the layoffs are necessary because Twitch’s users and revenue growth have not kept pace with Amazon’s expectations, he said.

(Emmett Shear resigned as CEO just days ago, though he is staying on for a transition period. It is not clear if Shear's exit was related to the new wave of layoffs.)