Amazon cutting hundreds cloud computing jobs

By Matt Day | Bloomberg

Amazon.com’s cloud division is cutting hundreds of jobs that will affect sales and marketing employees and the team developing technology for brick-and-mortar stores.

“We’ve identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline in order to continue focusing our efforts on the key strategic areas that we believe will deliver maximum impact,” an Amazon Web Services spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday. Amazon will try to find new roles for affected employees, he said.

Sales growth at AWS, the largest seller of rented computing power and data storage, slowed to a record low last year as corporate customers cut spending and delayed technology modernization projects.

The latest layoffs come about a year after AWS held its largest-ever round of job eliminations, part of a cost-cutting drive that saw Amazon slash 27,000 corporate roles following a pandemic-era hiring boom.

The terminations have continued after those mass layoffs, in recent months falling on the teams behind the voice-activated Alexa assistant, Prime Video and music division, and health care initiatives. Twitch, the company’s internet video streaming subsidiary, also eliminated jobs.

The cuts to Amazon’s stores technology team come the same week that the company confirmed that it would be removing the Just Walk Out cashierless shopping system from Amazon Fresh grocery stores in the US, replacing it with an automated grocery cart.