Amazon is set to terminate 30,000 corporate employees in the company’s largest layoff ever.
This is the comapny's latest cost-cutting initiative following an over-hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Simultaneously, the company is heavily investing in AI as it attempts to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy.
Amazon is set to terminate 30,000 corporate employees in the company’s largest layoff ever. The development was first reported by Reuters, citing anonymous sources, on Tuesday, 28 October 2025. The move comes as the company cuts costs after over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic and ramps-up investments in AI.
Amazon has a total workforce of 1.5 million employees – 350,000 in corporate, the rest in warehouses. The upcoming layoffs affect around 10% of its current corporate employees. This is potentially the biggest severance exercise the company has seen till date – the previous being the 27,000 employees it fired in 2022-23.
The notifications are reportedly being made to employees by email, beginning on 28 October 2025. Managers received training on 27 October 2025 on how to communicate the job cuts.
According to insiders, the move aims to level Amazon’s workforce after the tech giant over-hired during the 2020 pandemic to meet the demand upsurge for digital services. The move is likely to impact personnel across its Human Resources, Operations, and Devices and Services divisions.
The decision follows a report by Fortune magazine from October 2025 which revealed that Amazon was planning to terminate around 15% of its human resources workforce, with additional layoffs across divisions.
The company has been terminating employees in small batches for the past two years. Cuts have been made across its Devices, Communications, and Podcasting divisions – hundreds of workers were let go from Amazon’s Wondery podcast and Amazon Cloud Services just earlier this year.
Sources revealed that prior to the current wave of layoffs, Amazon had implemented a mandatory 5-days-a-week, work-from-office policy hoping to generate sufficient voluntary attrition amongst its employees. The initiative failed, leading to the massive volume of jobs having to be cut. Those that could not comply with the policy’s demands were told that they had ‘voluntarily quit’ the company and did not qualify for severance pay.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who took over after Jeff Bezos in 2021, has overseen several cost-cutting and de-bloating processes in the company. This is his latest attempt to remove ‘excess bureaucracy’ in the company structure, which includes removing unnecessary managerial levels. Meanwhile, he has heavily increased spending on AI, with the company having invested at least $100 billion in the initiative this year alone.
In June 2025, Jassy announced that growing use of AI tools in the company’s processes will likely lead to job cuts. “We expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” he said, adding that those who embrace and prepare for the change will have a chance at remaining.
Following the news break, Amazon shares rose by 1.3% before trading closed on Monday, 27 October 2025. According to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks layoffs across the tech sector, 98,000 jobs have been cut across 216 companies so far in 2025. [Rh]
