Technology: After Google, Amazon set to sack hundreds of employees soon
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: After Google gave the pink slip to around 12,000 staffers in 2023, and prepared to dismiss more this year, retail and technology giant Amazon is also set to sack hundreds in the coming weeks, the media reported on Thursday.
The latest job cuts will impact the Amazon employees of Prime Video and MGM Studios. The news coincided with Google’s similar announcement to lay off more employees on Wednesday.
Amazon will dismiss several hundred employees in its streaming and studio operations, the company announced in an internal memo on Wednesday, according to media reports.
“We’ve identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice-president of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, told employees.
The development follows Amazon’s last year’s massive job cuts when a staggering 27,000 jobs were axed across departments. Notably, Amazon employees were not the only ones engulfed in the technology layoff wave 2023, which witnessed huge job cuts across the industry, including those initiated by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, and Google.
Industry experts attributed the shadow pandemic of the layoff season to the sector’s push to hire heavily during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amazon’s announcement coincided with that of Google, which is also laying off hundreds of people working on its voice-activated Google Assistant software and the company’s Devices and Services team.
The exact number of employees being laid off by the firms was not immediately clear.
Google fired nearly 12,000 employees in 2023, the biggest layoff in the history of the company in a single year.
