Tech giant’s layoffs hit nearly 2,000 engineers | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

On October 28, Amazon issued an unusual layoff notice.

In a blog post titled “Staying nimble and continuing to strengthen our organizations,” Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior VP of people experience and technology, announced that the tech giant would be axing about 14,000 roles.

That announcement was part of the reported 30,000 job cuts Amazon was expecting to make in the near future.

Amazon employs more than 1.5 million people globally, but the job cuts were aimed at the company’s 350,000 corporate employees. The move represents Amazon’s most extensive layoffs since 2022, when it announced plans to cut 27,000 positions.

Major recent layoffs

Target revealed plans in late October to eliminate 1,800 corporate jobs, marking its second-largest corporate downsizing ever.
Amazon announced another round of layoffs just before the holidays. The cuts affected 14,000 corporate employees across multiple departments to reduce bureaucracy, “removing layers and shifting resources” to better serve its investments and customers.
UPS has cut about 48,000 jobs so far this year, including 34,000 positions through its Network Reconfiguration and Efficiency Reimagined program.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy continues to double down on efforts to streamline the company’s bureaucracy, aiming to reduce the number of managers.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he wants a leaner company.

Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images

Amazon targets engineers with latest round of layoffs

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification program requires companies with 100 or more employees to provide at least 60 days’ notice of a plant closing or mass layoff affecting more than 50 workers.

Nearly 40% of the more than 4,700 job cuts Amazon has made in New York, California, New Jersey, and Washington have been engineering roles, according to WARN notice data viewed by CNBC.

More than 1,800 engineers were let go in the layoffs.

U.S. layoff stats 2025:

1.6 million workers laid off each month
On pace for 19.2 million annually
206,101 employees laid off from 221 tech companies
Job cuts up 5.9% year over year
21% of companies expected to lay off employees Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

In announcing the layoffs, Galetti mentioned AI, calling it the “most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet.” She said that Amazon needs to be “organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership.”

According to tech market intelligence firm UnearthInsight, as many as 500,000 white-collar software workers could be laid off over the next two to three years, and about 70% of those layoffs would impact workers with 4-12 years of experience.

However, some critics argue that these companies are merely blaming AI for the job cuts, when the real issue was actually overhiring during the pandemic.

“I’m really skeptical whether the layoffs that we see currently are really due to true efficiency gains. It’s rather really a projection into AI in the sense of ‘We can use AI to make good excuses,’” Fabian Stephany, assistant professor of AI and work at the Oxford Internet Institute, told CNBC.

“It’s to some extent firing people that for whom there had not been a sustainable long-term perspective, and instead of saying ‘We miscalculated this two, three years ago,’ they can now come to the scapegoating, and that is saying, ‘It’s because of AI, though.’”

Companies issued nearly 40,000 WARN notices in October, reaching record levels

The fourth quarter used to be a time when employers refrained from layoffs, but that courtesy seems to be a vestige of the past.

“Over the last decade, companies have shied away from announcing layoffs in the fourth quarter, so it’s surprising to see so many in October. With the onset of social media and the ability for workers to share their negative experiences with their employers, the trend of announcing layoffs before the holidays fell away, a practice that seemed particularly cruel,” Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer of Challenger, Gray, & Christmas, recently said.

U.S. employers issued WARN notices for 39,006 Americans in October, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

The Fed has tracked WARN notices since 2008, and the number has only ever been higher in 2008, 2009, 2020, and May 2025.