Amazon starts laying off hundreds of staff as part of slashing 10,000 from its workforce

The online retail giant has started making huge cuts to its workforce with some revealed on LinkedIn, while one law forced the company to own up to others.

Amazon has begun its plans to lay off 10,000 staff with corporate roles the first to face the chopping block in the large-scale cuts.

It is the latest tech giant to slash its workforce after Meta, formerly Facebook, revealed it would let go of 13 per cent of its workforce, axing up to 11,000 staff in the first round of redundancies in the company’s history.

Twitter’s new billionaire owner Elon Musk has also brutally reduced the social media platform’s workforce and at Microsoft at least 1000 people have been let go.

Amazon is now following in their footsteps with the first round of cuts revealed due to a law requirement.

The Jeff Bezos-headed company had to notify regional authorities in California that it would cut about 260 roles at various facilities, including data scientists, software engineers and other corporate workers, with staff expected to leave by January 17.

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‘Delivering the Future’ is the Amazon motto – a company that Jeff Bezos founded 28 years ago to sell books over the internet which has become a e-commerce pioneer. Picture: Joseph Prezioso/AFP

California’s legislation requires companies to provide 60 days’ notice of staff cuts if they have 75 or more full-time or part-time workers.

Globally, Amazon employs more than 1.5 million workers, but many are casuals.

Further lay-offs were revealed via LinkedIn posts with a number of employees let go, including in its Cloud gaming platform Amazon Luna, as well as from its devices and services team.

“As part of our annual operating planning review process, we always look at each of our businesses and what we believe we should change,” Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said in a statement.

“As we’ve gone through this, given the current macro-economic environment (as well as several years of rapid hiring), some teams are making adjustments, which in some cases means certain roles are no longer necessary.”

Employees in Amazon’s robotic division. Picture: Joseph Prezioso/AFP

In a note posted on Amazon’s website, the devices and services team senior vice-president David Limp said the company was consolidating some teams and programs and would provide members with assistance to find new roles within the company.

Otherwise affected staff would be provided with a redundancy payment, external job placement support and something described as transitional benefits.

The tech giant has already implemented other cost-cutting measures such as axing projects like its subsidiary fabric.com, Amazon Care, and the cooler-size home delivery robot Scout and implementing a hiring freeze in some divisions.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said he plans to give away most of his $124 billion fortune – but just hours later news of the job cuts leaked. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

Amazon had enjoyed record-breaking profits during the pandemic as online shopping boomed, but since the world has returned to relative normality sales have slowed.

It broke through the billion-dollar revenue mark in Australia after its sales doubled during 2020, a 99.4 per cent jump from the year prior.

But the company’s good fortunes have not continued as it recorded two consecutive losses this year, although it was largely attributable to a write down of the value of its stock investment in electric vehicle start-up Rivian Automotive.

Despite entering the big Christmas spending period, the company’s projections for sales and revenue were also disappointing.