After Google, Amazon announces job cuts; hundreds to get pink slips

The latest job cuts by Amazon will impact the employees of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios. The news coincided with Google's similar announcement to layoff employees on Wednesday

Amazon is set to layoff several hundred employees in its streaming and studio operations, the company announced in an internal memo on Wednesday.

The company said the latest job cuts will impact the employees of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios. While the workers facing exit were supposed to be intimated on Wednesday, those in the remaining regions will be informed by the end of the week.

"We've identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact," Mike Hopkins, senior vice-president of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, told employees.

2023 tech layoffs spill over to new year

The development follows the retail giant's last year's massive job cuts, when a staggering 27,000 jobs were axed across departments. Notably, Amazon employees were not the only ones engulfed in the tech layoff wave 2023, which witnessed huge job cuts in the industry, including those initiated by Mark Zukerberg's Meta, and Google.

Industry experts had attributed the shadow pandemic of the layoff season to the sector's push to hire heavily during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Incidentally, in a similar episode, Amazon's announcement coincided with that of Google, which is also laying off hundreds of people working on its voice-activated Google Assistant software and the company's Devices and Services team.

The exact number of employees being laid off by the firms was not immediately clear.

Notably, Google fired nearly 12,000 employees in 2023, the biggest lay off in the history of the company in a single year.

(With inputs from Reuters)