Amazon (AMZN.US) begins a new round of small-scale layoffs, and the retail sector has become the “hardest hit area”

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Amazon (AMZN.US) confirmed on Wednesday that the company has cut back employees, mainly involving the Stores department responsible for its main e-commerce website. This layoff is the latest round of small-scale staff cuts at Amazon since large-scale layoffs began last year and continued until January of this year. The previous round of layoffs involved about 30,000 people. A person familiar with the matter said that Amazon has cut less than 1,000 white-collar workers this time.

An Amazon spokesperson said in an email statement: “We have adjusted part of the structure of the Stores business because we believe this structure will better help us implement the company's priorities.”

According to reports, several business units under the Stores division have been affected, including the customer service department and seller partner services department; other departments of Amazon may also be affected. Employees working in the US, India, and the UK all received layoff notices.

Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos said in an interview on Wednesday that due to the company's excessive recruitment during the pandemic, continued layoffs are necessary. When asked about the 30,000 jobs lost in the last round of layoffs, he said, “People stayed home at the time, and they kept placing orders. Incidentally, it was an unbelievable and stressful time for us.” “The whole team worked really hard and got a lot done, but our total number of employees really grew too fast.”

Amazon has had multiple rounds of layoffs since last year. In May 2025, Amazon confirmed the reduction of about 100 jobs in its Devices & Services division. The department is responsible for products such as Kindle, Echo speakers, Alexa, and Zoox autonomous vehicles. Amazon said at the time that this was only a small portion of the department's total number of employees and was part of a normal business review.

In July 2025, Amazon AWS cut at least hundreds of jobs. Teams such as AWS “specialists” were affected. These employees mainly help customers develop products and promote AWS services. Amazon did not announce the exact number, but people familiar with the matter said at least hundreds of people were affected. Notably, this layoff occurred shortly after CEO Andy Jasi warned that generative artificial intelligence (AI) might reduce some corporate jobs, so the market began linking Amazon's layoffs to AI automation and organizational efficiency improvements.

In October 2025, Amazon began large-scale layoffs. The company announced that it will make large-scale adjustments to corporate employees and reduce the overall number of corporate jobs by about 14,000. Amazon officially explained that the company wants to reduce management levels, increase employee accountability, reduce bureaucratic processes, and redirect resources to the most important business and customer needs. Amazon also made it clear at the time that it will continue to recruit in some strategic key areas in 2026, so this is not a complete freeze on recruitment, but rather “abolish some jobs while reallocating personnel to other fields.”

In January 2026, Amazon also announced that about 16,000 jobs would be cut. Amazon's senior vice president Beth Galetti said at the time that this was a continuation of previous organizational adjustments. Some teams completed adjustments in October 2025, but others did not complete the evaluation until January 2026, so the layoffs were implemented in batches.

By July 2026, Amazon made another layoff in the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) department, but the company did not disclose the exact number. Amazon explained that the company was “further focusing on the projects most important to customers” to speed up execution, so it had to cancel some positions in the AGI organization.

Amazon's current layoffs cannot simply be understood as “layoffs due to poor performance.” In fact, Amazon's second-quarter results announced in July showed that total revenue for the quarter increased 20% year over year to 2006 billion US dollars, better than analysts' average forecast of 1970 billion US dollars; operating profit was 27.5 billion US dollars, up 43% year over year; net profit was 62.6 billion US dollars, up 245% year over year, including 53.4 billion US dollars of non-operating income before tax, mainly from its investment in Anthropic; and diluted earnings per share were 5.75 US dollars, far higher than analysts' average forecast of 1.82 billion US dollars.

The core Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) revenue increased 37% year over year to $42.2 billion, better than analysts' average forecast of $40.6 billion, and the fastest growth rate since the fourth quarter of 2021. Jia Xi said that AWS is “booming,” and pointed out that its AI and self-developed chip business divisions are growing strongly. Both have annualized revenue of more than 25 billion US dollars, and both have achieved three-digit percentage growth over the same period last year. Amazon also raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast from the previous forecast of $200 billion to $220 billion.

As a result, Amazon's current layoff logic is closer to the need to streamline corporate organizations due to excessive recruitment during the pandemic. In addition, AI increases per capita productivity to push the company to reduce repetitive jobs and reinvest manpower and capital into strategic fields such as AI, cloud computing, chips, and robotics.