Amazon has confirmed that approximately 16,000 white-collar workers have been laid off during their second round of job cuts. This has pushed the company closer to its reported target of cutting roughly 30,000 corporate roles worldwide – the largest job reduction in its history.
The latest cuts impact teams across Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail, and HR, following the 14,000 white-collar roles eliminated in October. Taken together, the reductions represent around 10% of Amazon’s Corporate workforce, according to reporting from Reuters and the Guardian.
What We Know So Far
News of layoffs emerged after an internal email was mistakenly shared with AWS employees earlier this week.
The draft message, signed by Colleen Aubrey, SVP of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, referenced an internal restructuring effort known as “Project Dawn”, indicating that affected employees in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica had already been informed. The meeting linked to the email was later cancelled. The email also referred to a separate message from Amazon’s HR leadership, which does not appear to have been sent.
Part of the email said: “Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”
Amazon’s official statement has noted that the company will work toward supporting those impacted by the layoffs, and will offer most US-based employees 90 days to search for a new role internally. Those who are unable to find a new role with Amazon will receive transitional support through severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits, and more.
Since the first round of layoffs back in October, Amazon has been careful about how it frames these job cuts. CEO Andy Jassy has previously stated that the reductions are “not really financially driven” and “not even really AI-driven”, instead pointing to cultural issues that emerged after rapid years of expansion.
According to Amazon, layers of management, slower decision-making, and internal bureaucracy had begun to weigh on the company.
That explanation aligns with Amazon’s aggressive white-collar hiring during the pandemic, when cheap capital and surging demand pushed the company to scale as quickly as possible across both retail and cloud operations. As growth has now stabilized, the company was reportedly left with a corporate structure that many inside Amazon now see as overly complex.
However, the context of AI is difficult to ignore or brush aside. Amazon has invested heavily in automation and generative AI across its business, particularly within AWS, where AI tooling is increasingly embedded into core workflows.
Jassy has also openly warned employees previously that some white-collar roles could be replaced by AI in the coming years – even if these two rounds of layoffs aren’t being positioned that way.
So while culture and over-hiring might be part of the explanation, it’s likely not the whole story. As AI systems grow more capable, companies are quickly reassessing how much human oversight is needed and where roles can be streamlined.
Speaking to London Loves Business, Peter Fedoročko, CTO of GoodData, sees Amazon’s recent moves as emblematic of a broader shift across big tech. “Many companies overexpanded during a period of cheap capital and rapid digital acceleration,” he said. “Now they’re confronting what happens when automation, AI, and market efficiency collide with over-hiring.”
“The real question,” Fedoročko added, “isn’t whether AI eliminates jobs, but how organizations redesign systems so humans and automated workflows work together effectively. The value now lies in people who can design, monitor, and collaborate with automated systems, not compete against them.”
Final Thoughts
Amazon’s layoffs highlight an increasingly common reality for large enterprises: workforce reductions are rarely driven by a single factor.
Culture, efficiency, and AI readiness are becoming deeply intertwined, even when companies publicly emphasize one over the others.
