Amazon India lays off 400-500 employees as part of global restructuring

New Delhi, May 16

Amazon India has laid off around 400-500 employees from its Cloud division AWS as well as People Experience and Technology Solutions (PXT) or HR and support verticals.

The downsizing in the country is part of the 9,000 layoffs announcement in March by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, according to sources.

Amazon in March announced to lay off 9,000 employees in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Twitch, advertising and HR.

The e-commerce giant initially eliminated 18,000 positions in January and as "we completed the second phase of our planning this month, it led us to these additional 9,000 role reductions", according to the memo by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared with employees in March.

"I'm writing to share that we intend to eliminate about 9,000 more positions in the next few weeks -- mostly in AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch," he had mentioned.

"This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term," he added.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky had also announced the layoffs at AWS would begin from North American, and then reach globally.

"Both our company size and the size of our team have grown significantly in recent years, driven by customer demand for the cloud and the unique value that AWS offers. This growth has come quickly as we have moved as fast as we could to build what customers needed," Selipsky had mentioned.

Given this rapid growth, as well as the broader business and macroeconomic climate, "it is critical that we focus on identifying and putting our resources behind our top priorities -- the things that matter most to customers and that will move the needle in our business," Selipsky had said in another memo.

During the quarterly earnings call last month, Jassy said that the e-commerce giant made "the very difficult decision" to eliminate about 27,000 corporate roles and like most leadership teams, it will continue to evaluate what "we're seeing in our business and proceed adaptively".

Jassy said while the company has taken several actions to streamline costs, "we've been able to do so while still pursuing the key strategic long-term investments".