Amazon is preparing to initiate the largest corporate layoff in its history, with as many as 30,000 employees expected to lose their jobs beginning Tuesday, according to multiple reports.
The cuts will span nearly every department, affecting a significant portion of the company’s 350,000-strong corporate workforce, and signal an escalation in Amazon’s ongoing efforts to streamline operations in a shifting economic and technological landscape.
While Amazon has declined official comment, internal sources confirmed to CNBC that employees will begin receiving layoff notifications via email early Tuesday. If the reported figures hold, this will be the most extensive job reduction by a single tech company since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and the most sweeping in Amazon’s own three-decade history.
Though Amazon remains the second-largest private employer in the U.S., with over 1.5 million workers globally (the majority of whom are in fulfillment centers and logistics), the layoffs are aimed squarely at its white-collar workforce. The decision reflects a broader and intensifying trend across the tech industry, where economic uncertainty, AI disruption, and pandemic-era overexpansion are now colliding.
According to Layoffs.fyi, more than 98,000 tech jobs have already been cut in 2025 alone, and that figure is set to jump significantly with Amazon’s latest move. Microsoft has laid off 15,000 workers so far this year; Intel tops the list with 22,000 cuts; Meta recently downsized its AI division by 600 people; and Salesforce, Google, and others have continued their own rounds of layoffs.
But Amazon’s case stands apart in scope and timing. Since late 2022, Amazon has been conducting rolling layoffs — first hitting its cloud, retail, devices, and communications divisions — amounting to roughly 27,000 job losses prior to this new round. CEO Andy Jassy has framed the reductions as a necessary realignment of the company’s corporate structure, part of a broader campaign to “flatten organizations” and remove management layers.
Crucially, Jassy has not shied away from citing generative AI as a long-term driver of this shift. In a June 2025 internal memo, he wrote:
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs… We expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”
This is the subtext behind many of the industry’s recent cuts. AI is no longer just a buzzword; it’s a budget line, a workforce reducer, and, for companies like Amazon, a central feature of long-term strategic planning. The tech giants that once aggressively hired to fuel innovation and market domination are now repositioning themselves to maintain those positions with leaner teams and more automated processes.
