Amazon to eliminate 16,000 corporate jobs

According to Reuters, the online giant plans to initiate workforce reductions across business units including Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video and HR, known at Amazon as the People Experience and Technology department. According to an internal memo from Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, which was shared publicly Wednesday, January 28, this will involve removing about 16,000 employees from the payroll compared with the 14,000 roles Reuters had reported earlier this week.

In October 2025, Amazon laid off roughly 14,000 corporate employees as part of what Reuters reported was a larger initiative to reduce expenses and rectify excessive increases in staffing levels it made during the COVID-19 pandemic. Combined with the October staff reductions, the latest reportedly planned layoffs would represent close to 10% of Amazon’s roughly 350,000-person corporate workforce, Chain Store Age reports.

Reports of corporate layoffs follow media coverage of Amazon expecting that increasing usage of robots could enable to it replace more than 500,000 U.S. human employees and avoid having to bring on another 160,000 workers by 2027. Amazon has publicly denied those reports.

In addition, in a June 2025 message to employees which was posted on the Amazon corporate blog, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy discussed how the company sees generative AI and agentic AI as transformative technologies which will allow the company to reduce its corporate workforce. Jassy did not specify how many employees could have their jobs eliminated in the message.

Amazon brought on 250,000 seasonal holiday workers for the third straight year during the 2025 holiday season. However, the company has been reducing corporate headcount for the past few years, including the layoff of roughly 200 employees from its North America stores group, which includes the Fashion and Fitness offering, in January 2025.

These actions have also included cutting hundreds of positions across several divisions of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit in April 2024, as well as reportedly reducing headcount by less than 5% at the unit responsible for its Buy with Prime service in January 2024.

That same month, the company eliminated several hundred roles across the Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios organization, and also laid off “just over 500 people” across its Twitch gaming streaming platform.