Amazon begins firing 10K employees, Alexa & Cloud gaming worst hit

SAN FRANCISCO: After Meta and Twitter, Amazon has become another Big Tech company to lay off thousands of workers and the process to eliminate 10,000 employees, or 3 per cent of its workforce, kicked off at the company, the media reported.

The massive job cuts have hit several divisions, especially the Alexa virtual assistant business and the Luna cloud gaming unit, and corporate employees were being informed about being let go, reports CNBC.

"Amazon employees were called into meetings with their managers across the country Tuesday, and many were told they had two months to find another job internally or accept severance payment," the Washington Post reported late on Tuesday.

Within hours of the layoffs beginning, employees started posting on LinkedIn to say they had been asked to go and were looking for new jobs.

"Several employees were laid off from Amazon's Alexa team, which works on the voice assistant technology, and layoffs occurred in Boston, Seattle, Vancouver and the Bay Area," said the report.

"Seeing these aI Got Laid Off' posts is horribly distressing. This is horrible," one laid-off employee wrote in the company's internal messaging app Slack.

Earlier this month, Amazon announced a broad hiring freeze among its white-collar workforce that would last at least "the next few months."

Meta earlier cut 11,000 jobs, and Twitter laid off about 3,800 regular employees, apart from sacking thousands of contractual workers.

Amazon employed more than 1.5 million workers (as of September).

Earlier this year, the e-commerce giant more than doubled the cash compensation cap for its tech employees, citing "a particularly competitive labour market", according to reports.