Amazon Web Services lays off several hundred tech, sales staff

Amazon Web Services has eliminated several hundred sales, marketing and tech roles, it said on Wednesday (April 3), the latest in a series of job cuts by its parent Amazon.com.

The impacted staff include a few hundred each at AWS' sales, marketing and global services division and the physical stores technology team, the cloud-computing arm of Amazon said.

"We've identified a few targeted areas of the organisation we need to streamline," an AWS spokesperson said on mail.

Amazon has over the past months laid off hundreds of staff in divisions, including its Prime Video service, healthcare business and Alexa voice assistant unit, as big technology firms extend their massive job cuts over the past two years into 2024.

More than 57,000 workers have been laid off across 229 firms so far this year, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi.

Amazon had laid off more than 27,000 in 2022 and 2023, after the tech industry hired too many people during the pandemic.

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The cut at AWS' 60,000-strong sales, marketing and global services division are likely part of a broad reorganisation under sales chief Matt Garman, according to news site The Information, which first reported the development.

After suffering a slowdown in growth last year due to an uncertain economy, Amazon's cloud business has been showing signs of stabilization, helping the company beat quarterly revenue expectations in February.

Still, its position as the world's biggest cloud provider is being challenged by rival Microsoft, which has taken an early lead in the race to make money from generative artificial intelligence through an investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.