Amazon Inadvertently Announces Cloud Unit Layoffs In Email To Employees (cnbc.com)
- Reference: 0180670902
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/28/0457219/amazon-inadvertently-announces-cloud-unit-layoffs-in-email-to-employees
- Source link: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/27/amazon-inadvertently-sends-email-to-employees-confirming-wednesday-layoffs.html
> "Changes like this are hard on everyone," Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at Amazon Web Services, wrote in an email viewed by CNBC. "These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success." The note also references a post from Amazon's HR boss Beth Galetti and said the company notified "impacted colleagues in our organization." The subject of the email mentions "Project Dawn," and the email says it was "canceled," possibly indicating it was recalled by the sender after the fact. It's unclear what Project Dawn refers to.
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> The job cuts come after Amazon announced in October that it would lay off 14,000 corporate employees. At the time, the company indicated the cuts would continue in 2026 as it found "additional places we can remove layers." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the layoffs were meant to reduce management layers and bureaucracy inside the company. He also predicted last June that efficiency gains from AI would shrink Amazon's corporate staff in the coming years.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/27/amazon-inadvertently-sends-email-to-employees-confirming-wednesday-layoffs.html
One thing I find sadly amusing (Score:5, Informative)
I notice that, with this and other layoffs, they euphemistically talk about "removing layers" - but in actual practice they're typically only removing the very bottom layer (a bunch of actual workers).
Re: (Score:1)
Is that really true? Many of the layoffs I've seen over the past year have been legitimately "removing layers", purging loads of fat in middle management.
Companies constantly go through cycles where they stretch to a very vertical structure with a manager for every three employees (exaggerating, but only slightly), and then there's the periodic flattening where they prune it out.
Expect more outages (Score:1)
Uptime is already suffering
Efficiency gains from AI :o (Score:2)
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy .. predicted last June that efficiency gains from AI would shrink Amazon's corporate staff in the coming years.
I don't think so. AI is oversold. There will be less efficiency rather than more and no one to talk to.
Re: (Score:2)
People miss that AI isn't REPLACING corporate positions, it's identifying positions that are not needed. This is something it's good at.
It doesn't need to reach the level where it can do someones job to determine that the job is useless to the company or that a reorg can make the position redundant. This is where the layoffs are coming from - cutting out the fat.
You only need one manager reading the TPS reports.
Communication Skills (Score:3)
It's odd that in this sort of situation - delivering bad news to employees - the communication skills that HR departments usually promote, seem lacking.
Presumably in an effort to soften the blow, terms like "impacted", and "positioning for future success" are used, which to the impacted employees just sound like management-speak, and probably add a sprinkle of irritation onto the serving of bad news.
Management-speak is a dialect used to add the impression of professionalism to what is often a content of marketing or obfuscation. It can work on peers, but can be counter-productive when used on people who value precision, like computer folk.
Re: (Score:2)
In this case it's true though. Anyone working at Amazon would be better off working somewhere else. That place is toxic (the HR-speak only emphasizes it).
yo, Alexa. (Score:1)
Get fucked.