ALBAWABA - Amazon said on Wednesday that it is laying off several hundred workers from tech, sales, and marketing positions in its cloud computing subsidiary (AWS). This is the most recent in an 18-month string of layoffs the online retailer has been making.
Up to 160 positions in the company's advertising operations were eliminated last week, Business Insider reports, it also terminated hundreds of positions from its Prime Video and healthcare divisions earlier this year.
“We’ve identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline in order to continue focusing our efforts on the key strategic areas that we believe will deliver maximum impact,” a spokesperson for Amazon Web Services said in a statement.
2,260 job cuts this month, so far #MacroEdge pic.twitter.com/LofK1XxfAT
— MacroEdge (@MacroEdgeRes) April 2, 2024
Due to businesses cutting down on cloud spending due to increasing interest rates, Amazon's profitable AWS division has suffered a slowdown in its sales growth over the past quarters, according to CNBC. With Amazon executives saying in February that the market is beginning to show indications of reacceleration, giving rise to some confidence.
As Reuters notes, Microsoft is putting pressure on Amazon to relinquish its title as the largest cloud provider in the world. By investing in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, Microsoft has gotten an early advantage in the competition to profit from generative artificial intelligence.
More than 27,000 employees were let go by Amazon in 2022 and 2023 as a result of the tech sector went through an over-hiring trend during the COVID-19 epidemic, to keep up with demand for online services, with 229 firms laying off over 57,000 employees according to data from Layoffs.fyi.
