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Amazon connected Tuesday appeared to person prematurely alerted Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees to layoffs planned for Wednesday greeting by sending a commiseration email and team-wide gathering invitation hours early.
Reuters reported connected Friday that Amazon intended to laic disconnected thousands of firm employees starting this week. But the institution has not yet informed impacted employees, nor has it confirmed the layoff plan.
The email sent connected Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, elder vice president of applied AI solutions astatine AWS, wrongly said that impacted employees successful the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they mislaid their jobs.
In Slack messages viewed by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said the Wednesday gathering was astir instantly canceled. Amazon referred successful the email to the layoffs arsenic “Project Dawn.”
“Changes similar this are hard connected everyone,” Aubrey wrote successful the email, reviewed by Reuters. “These decisions are hard and are made thoughtfully arsenic we position our enactment and AWS for aboriginal success.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to a petition for comment.
Jobs successful the company’s units covering AWS, retail, Prime Video and quality resources were slated to beryllium affected, radical acquainted with the substance told Reuters, though the afloat scope of this week’s cuts was unclear.
Amazon laid disconnected about 14,000 radical successful October arsenic portion of a broader program to trim firm unit by astir 30,000, radical acquainted with the substance said astatine the time.
On Tuesday, Amazon chopped jobs successful its Fresh market and Go marketplace divisions arsenic it plans to adjacent existing brick-and-mortar stores and person immoderate of them to Whole Foods stores. It did not disclose the fig of affected employees.
The size of the cuts to beryllium announced connected Wednesday remained unclear. The afloat 30,000 jobs flagged successful October would correspond a tiny information of Amazon’s 1.58 million employees, but astir 10% of the firm’s firm workforce.
Amazon, successful an October blog post, tied those occupation cuts to the accrued usage of artificial intelligence. That station from the caput of quality resources, Beth Galetti, indicated much occupation cuts were apt successful the future.
The errant email Tuesday referred to a blog station by Galetti, which has not yet appeared connected Amazon’s website.
