Amazon.com Inc. is laying off a total of 18,000 people, including 143 from the Los Angeles area. This amounts to about 6% of the company’s workforce.
The e-commerce company is among a flurry of technology companies making cuts. Layoffs.fyi, a crowdsourced site that has tracked tech company layoffs since the beginning of the pandemic, reported that about 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs last year nationwide.
Last year, Santa Monica-based Snap Inc. was among the many tech companies to lay off workers. The social media company cut approximately 20% of its workforce as part of a plan to restructure its business. Rolling into the new year, the workforce cuts continue. Last month, Microsoft Corp. chief executive Satya Nadella announced that the company would be dismissing 10,000 employees. On Jan. 20, Alphabet, parent company of Google, announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs. And in early January, Burbank-based human resources tech company CareerArc announced via LinkedIn that it had made cuts to its workforce.
“Today was a tough day. Some very smart, talented people lost their jobs as the company reorganized,” the company stated in a post.
Tech companies, large and small, went on a hiring spree during the pandemic. Amid lockdowns, people were forced to improve their at-home tech hardware to work from home and e-commerce shopping hit an all-time high, creating a spike in tech revenues. With inflation and interest rates on the rise, the economic outlook for tech companies is not as bright now as it was then.
As the tech industry shifts and companies navigate towards new technologies, like artificial intelligence, they are forced to reorganize resources to make space for innovation.
In a blog post titled “Focusing on our short- and long-term opportunity,” Nadella wrote, “First, as we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less. We’re also seeing organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one.”
