Amazon to Cut 30,000 Corporate Jobs Amid Drive to ‘Decrease Bureaucracy’

Amazon reportedly plans to start cutting as many as 30,000 corporate jobs Tuesday (Oct. 28) as part of an effort to reduce the amount of bureaucracy and the number of managers at the company.

The cuts will target the company’s human resources; operations, devices and services; and Amazon Web Services divisions, Reuters reported Monday (Oct. 27), citing unnamed sources.

The impacted staffers will start receiving email notifications Tuesday morning, according to the report.

Amazon did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

These job cuts would follow a series of cuts that began in late 2022 and eventually totaled about 27,000 layoffs, according to the Reuters report.

The new cuts would amount to nearly 10% of Amazon’s corporate employees, who number about 350,000, but only a small percentage of the company’s total workforce of 1.55 million, the report said.

The company is set to announce its third quarter earnings on Thursday (Oct. 30).

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in September 2024 that the company planned to reduce the number of managers in each of its organizations and to “operate like the world’s largest startup.”

“If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day,” Jassy wrote at the time in a message shared with Amazon employees and shared online.

When Amazon began its earlier series of layoffs in November 2022, Jassy said the company had hired rapidly over the previous several years and was looking at workforce levels.

In other news, Amazon said Monday that it plans to invest more than €1.4 billion in the Netherlands over the next three years to support both Amazon Web Services and the company’s retail business.

The company has served customers in the Netherlands for five years and now has more than 4,500 of the country’s small and medium-sized businesses selling on its platform, according to a Monday press release.