US technology giant Amazon has confirmed it will cut 16,000 jobs – hours after it told staff about a new round of global redundancies in an email apparently sent in error.
The email, seen by the BBC, was sent late on Tuesday and refers to a large number of employees in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica being laid off as part of an effort to “strengthen the company.”
The message was apparently shared in error, and it was quickly cancelled.
Early Wednesday, Amazon announced job cuts as part of a plan to “remove bureaucracy” at the company.
Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, said on Wednesday it was not planning to make “broad reductions every few months”, referring to Amazon’s announcement of 14,000 corporate job cuts in October.
“While many teams finalised their organisational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now,” she said.
Amazon employs around 1.5 million people globally, with around 350,000 in corporate roles.
Amazon has not said where the latest job losses will fall or which countries will be affected.
Project Dawn
On Tuesday, a draft email from Colleen Aubrey, a senior vice president at Amazon Web Services (AWS), was included in a calendar invitation sent by an executive assistant to several Amazon employees.
The invitation was titled “Send project Dawn email,” an apparent reference to Amazon’s code name for the job redundancies.
While the email made clear that the cuts were happening at Amazon, employees had not yet been officially informed.
“This is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers,” the email said.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success,” it added.
The lay-offs had been expected by Amazon employees for weeks, according to a former worker who asked not be identified.
The broad understanding among staff had been that bosses intended to cut a total of around 30,000 roles, the former employee added, who left Amazon as part of a redundancy round in October.
The firm was expected to reach that number of job cuts with another major set of lay-offs this month, followed by further redundancies until the end of May.
While affected workers were invited to reapply for open positions at Amazon, the number of such roles was limited. People who did not move to another role received severance pay based on how long they had worked at the company.
‘Time to rethink’
Since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stood down as its chief executive four years ago, his successor Andy Jassy has led the company through several rounds of cuts.
Jassy has also attempted to bring a more strict work culture to the firm.
In-office work is now mandatory five-days a week, making Amazon one of the only major tech companies to require its employees to be in the office full-time.
Amazon is also focused on reducing costs, even monitoring corporate mobile phone use by AWS employees, according to a report in Business Insider, in an effort to limit a long-standing $50 per month reimbursement.
In an email Jassy sent to employees before the Thanksgiving holiday viewed by the BBC, the chief executive said he was thankful for the “challenges at opportunities at work” as “the world is changing at a very rapid rate.”
Jassy called this era at Amazon “a time to rethink everything we’ve ever done.”
Earlier on Tuesday, the company announced it would close its roughly 70 remaining Amazon-branded grocery stores, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, and expand its Whole Foods Market business.
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