Amazon will reportedly lay off about 10,000 employees this week

Amazon plans to lay off approximately 10,000 employees in corporate and tech jobs starting this week, reported The New York Times.

Anonymous sources told The Times that job cuts will affect those who work on Amazon devices including voice-assistant Alexa, as well as its retail division and human resources.

This would be the largest number of job cuts in the company’s history, representing roughly 3% of its corporate staff and less than 1% of more than 1.5 million employees around the globe.

Daily Hive has reached out to Amazon to see if Canadian jobs have been impacted.

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News of these job cuts comes during a critical time for the company as the holiday shopping season begins.

The company has already implemented cost-cutting measures including a hiring freeze for corporate positions in its retail division; shutting down its telehealth service; and closing, cancelling, or delaying new warehouse locations.

Unfortunately, this is just the latest in a slew of layoffs in the tech industry.

Last week, Canadians were among the 11,000 employees laid off by Facebook’s parent company Meta.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributed the “hard decision to let people go” to increased investment in building the company’s online presence through the augmented reality universe, Metaverse.

“Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”

The week before that, Vancouver-based tech company Hootsuite announced a second round of layoffs, and Twitter employees found out they were being axed by new CEO Elon Musk over email.