Amazon’s layoffs will hit hard

Early one morning in January, Jake Lindsley woke up to a message: Amazon It was lighting up his cell phone.

“I thought they were saying, ‘My package is delayed,'” Lindsley said in an interview. “I read it again and thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m fired.'”

Lindsley worked as a finance manager at Amazon for nearly six years and was one of about 16,000 employees targeted by the company’s mass layoffs in late January. Combined with the layoffs of more than 14,000 employees three months ago, this is the largest layoff in Amazon’s history.

As an Amazon employee, Lindsley was part of America’s corporate elite. I worked at a large technology company with opportunities for growth, promotion, high pay, and enviable perks. But he and other laid-off workers suddenly found themselves faced with the harsh reality of a labor market that is rapidly being reshaped by artificial intelligence, leaving them to compete with hordes of others who have been laid off. Meta, sales force and Cisco. In some cases, the job they were hired for no longer exists. And the tech giant continues to cut roles as part of its hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to invest in AI.

The tech industry has laid off about 140,000 workers in the U.S. so far this year, more than any other industry, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Industry-wide layoffs reached their highest level since August 2024 in May, but eased in June.

Challenger said in a report last week that AI was the main reason companies announced cuts for the fourth consecutive month. The company says AI will be cited in about 23% of all layoff announcements in 2026.

“Technology remains the epicenter of cuts this year,” Challenger said. “AI is becoming a dominant force as companies reorganize around AI, automate roles, and reallocate budgets to new capabilities. The field is being reshaped in real time.”

Amazon has been more aggressive than many of its peers in cutting its workforce, laying off more than 57,000 workers, or about 16% of its workforce, starting in 2022. Amazon has accounted for about 13% of the tech industry’s layoffs this year, according to data from the website Layoffs.fyi.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned employees that AI “should change the way we work” and that over the next few years, “a company’s total workforce will shrink” as technology increases efficiency. The company has been looking for ways to ease pandemic-era hiring glut and cut out bureaucracy so it can operate like “the world’s largest startup.”

CNBC spoke to more than a dozen people who have been laid off by Amazon over the past eight months about how they have navigated the job market as unemployment in the industry increases and opportunities for many feel diminished.

Some have since gone on to land roles in places like; apple Companies like Salesforce and others are looking at hundreds of unanswered job applications and roles with reduced pay. Some expressed the dark irony of Amazon’s commitment to AI only to be replaced by AI.

Amazon spokeswoman Montana McLachlan said in a statement that the cuts were made to allow the company to move quickly and serve its customers. Amazon continues to hire and invest in strategic areas that are important to the company’s future, he added.

Mr McLachlan said: “We do not take the decision to eliminate roles lightly and are working hard to support affected employees.”

Amazon said the majority of the layoffs were not caused by AI.

Lindsley’s job search lasted about three months, and in April she became vice president of a healthcare IT startup.

“I’d rather have a stable job than one that grows five times and disappears overnight,” he says.

Courtney Heflinger applied for hundreds of jobs but had trouble getting an interview.

In the months since she was laid off from Amazon Web Services in January, she has started her day at her computer at 8:30 a.m., scanning job boards and refreshing her inbox while waiting to hear back from recruiters.

As soon as the job is posted, Hoeflinger said he expects to receive 200 to 300 applicants right away. She didn’t know if it was because of mass unemployment or bots running wild.

“It’s making it harder for us, real job seekers, to get in the door,” said Hoeflinger, 49, who got the job last week. AT&T. I get irritated.

In the months since she left Amazon, the pace of layoffs has increased across the industry, making difficult tasks seem impossible.

Mr. Hoeflinger applied for several jobs at Meta around the time the company announced plans to cut 10% of its workforce. work at oracle I found her feed. But I hesitated to apply when I saw that the software vendor was cutting thousands of jobs.

Meanwhile, Amazon continues to cut jobs in smaller rounds, with cuts in its customer service division in April followed by cuts in its third-party seller support division in May, said people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the cuts aren’t public.

The company laid off 57 employees in its home state of Washington between May and early June, according to a WARN filing released Monday. The filing did not indicate which departments were affected, but the positions listed included software engineers, program managers, and product managers.

Dorian Smith only worked for about a month after being laid off at Amazon in January, but said it was a humbling experience that led him to take a job at a late-stage startup.

Smith said he had worked at Amazon for more than 10 years, working his way up from customer service to web development engineer and considered it his “career for life.”

“In a way, it was almost heartbreaking because I felt like my identity was tied to that job,” Smith said.

Smith said he applied to at least 250 jobs, but only heard back from four companies, all of which were “just your run-of-the-mill rejection emails.” After posting on LinkedIn, he eventually connected with a recruiter, which led him into the startup world.

“I always thought, ‘This is an honor that says Amazon on my resume,'” Smith said. “But when this round of layoffs happened, it was like, ‘Okay, big deal, 30,000 other people are going to be like that too.’

For some former Amazon employees, the layoffs were an opportunity for a reset.

Yogesh Verma, a former AWS engineer who lost his job in January, called it a “blessing in disguise.” The 25-year-old said he became frustrated with Amazon after it enacted strict return-to-office policies, pressure mounted over its use of AI and employees were tasked with “developing new products in a haphazard manner.”

“At first I was like, ‘Oh, what am I going to do now?’ But things gradually changed for the better,” Verma said. “My workload was increasing and my work-life balance was getting worse.”

In April, Verma said she accepted a slight pay cut to join an AI marketing company that offered a “good environment,” hybrid working options and the opportunity to learn new skills.

A former director of Amazon’s advertising division who was fired in October, and asked to remain anonymous to avoid jeopardizing his job search, said working for the big tech company was “life-changing,” but the job became draining on his mental and physical health.

He said he is taking time off to strengthen his AI coding skills and is ready for “this new era of software development” when he re-enters the job market.

Chris DeSantis, a senior product manager for nearly four years, said he was “happy to make less money” if it meant working for a company that was closer to the cutting edge of AI. Mr. DeSantis, 32, was fired from Amazon’s retail organization in January.

“When you look at these companies and what they’re doing with AI, engineers and technical product managers like us want to have fun and build things super fast,” DeSantis said. “It used to be that going to a big company was the norm. But now, at least from the organization I worked for, it’s far from fun.”

Fun or not, AI is taking over the halls of Amazon.

Jassy, ​​who replaced founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021, encouraged employees to “experiment with AI wherever possible” and find ways to “get more done with more efficient teams.”

AWS has released a number of AI tools primarily targeted at enterprises, but it has also worked to develop more competitive AI models, putting Amazon at the center of a surge in AI computing demand. The company brought AI to more aspects of its e-commerce website, including the search bar, and revamped its aging Alexa digital assistant to include more conversational and agent-like features.

The AI ​​blitz is seen as essential for Amazon to stay relevant in the next era of technology, but life at the company currently resembles a “rat race,” according to a working software engineer who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the matter.

Some managers at Amazon track employees’ AI activity through internal dashboards, and some teams are told by leaders to remind teams to adopt the tools whenever possible, factoring usage into performance reviews, three current and former employees said.

“It’s abundantly clear that the priority is AI everywhere, regardless of whether it’s really useful or meaningful,” said a former AWS engineer who was fired in January and also requested anonymity.

At the same time, Amazon and other companies are considering the high cost of AI and are taking steps to curb so-called token maxing, where developers use AI as much as possible with little regard for the output.

Another former AWS engineer said Amazon added badges to its internal “phone tools” directory that scored employees’ usage of an AI app called Q based on the number of tokens they spent.

In late May, Amazon shut down a similar phone tool leaderboard called Kirorank after it was discovered that employees were token-maxing to move up the ranks.

Amazon is ramping up hiring in low-cost countries like India as the company cuts jobs, according to three former employees who spoke about the move within their organizations. One of them, a former manager who was fired in May, called this a “no surprise” because the company knows it can hire people at “a fraction of the cost” in India compared to Seattle.

DeSantis, a laid-off product manager, said he adopted a “survivalist mindset” after surviving six layoffs during his time at Amazon. When his turn finally came, DeSantis said he tried his best not to take it personally.

“It’s really weird when that happens to you,” DeSantis said. “Looking back, I feel like I couldn’t have done anything.”

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