Amazon lays off 9,000 more

Amazon is laying off another 9,000 office workers in the second major downsizing for the tech giant since the fall, bringing its total cuts to around 27,000.

The office worker layoffs include more than 400 at its San Franciscobased video game streaming division Twitch, along with its Amazon Web Services, People Experience and Technology and advertising divisions.

Twitch said “user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations.”

The Twitch layoffs come just days after CEO Emmett Shear resigned after 16 years at the company he co-founded, citing a desire to spend time with his new son. “I want to be fully there for my son as he enters this world and I feel ready for this change to tackle new challenges,” Shear said.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo that the second round of layoffs were needed because not all teams had finalized their cost-cutting reviews earlier this year.

“(G)iven the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount. The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key longterm customer experience,” Jassy said.

There will be limited hiring in the near term, he said.

The Seattle e-commerce company's total layoffs are the most of any tech company during the pandemic, exceeding Meta's 21,000-person downsizing. But they represent less than 2 percent of Amazon's workforce.

The company more than doubled its employee count to a staggering peak of 1.6 million office and warehouse workers in 2021, which fell to 1.54 million at the end of 2022.

The tech giant is now cutting costs throughout its operations, including closing all four of its San Francisco cashier-free Go stores, along with four others in New York and Seattle. Construction was paused on the second phase of its HQ2 project in Virginia.

Amazon's Twitch division draws 31 million viewers each day but has sought to boost revenue, sometimes angering the video streamers that provide all of the site's content. Dan Clancy, who succeeded Shear as the new CEO, said last September that the site would reduce revenue share agreements with its top streamers starting this June. The move drew backlash from streamers, who have also criticized the company for not doing more to combat harassment.

Amazon reported $278 million in fourth-quarter net income, down sharply from $14.3 billion the prior year.

Work on a major Amazon logistics center in San Francisco was also blocked after city supervisors passed a temporary moratorium last year.