Attendees walk through an exposition hall at AWS re:Invent, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2024.
Noah Berger | Getty Images
Amazon is laying off some staffers in its cloud computing division, the company confirmed Thursday.
“After a thorough review of our organization, our priorities, and what we need to focus on going forward, we’ve made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams in AWS,” Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said in a statement. “We didn’t make these decisions lightly, and we’re committed to supporting the employees throughout their transition.”
The company declined to say which units within Amazon Web Services were impacted, or how many employees will be let go as a result of the job cuts.
AWS’ training and certification unit was one of the groups to see cuts, according to a memo sent out by division head Michelle Vaz and viewed by CNBC.
Reuters was first to report on the layoffs.
In May, Amazon reported a third straight quarterly revenue miss at AWS. Sales increased 17% to $29.27 billion in the first quarter, slowing from 18.9% in the prior period.
Amazon said the cuts weren’t primarily due to investments in artificial intelligence, but are a result of ongoing efforts to streamline the workforce and refocus on certain priorities. The company said it continues to hire within AWS.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been on a cost-cutting mission for the past several years, which has resulted in more than 27,000 employees being let go since 2022. Job reductions have continued this year, though at a smaller scale than preceding years. Amazon’s stores, communications, and devices and services divisions have been hit with layoffs in recent months.
AWS last year cut hundreds of jobs in its physical stores technology and sales and marketing units.
Last month, Jassy predicted that Amazon’s corporate workforce could shrink even further as a result of the company embracing generative AI.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy told staffers. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”
