Amazon’s Fumbles Mass Layoff Plan – Mistakenly Sends Internal Email to Workers Confirming 16K Job Cuts

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images.

Amazon fumbled its effort to quietly roll out a fresh round of mass layoffs late Tuesday after an internal email mistakenly warned employees they had already lost their jobs, before the company had officially informed anyone.

The misfire hit staff at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing arm, according to Reuters, in an email that was sent hours ahead of a planned Wednesday morning announcement and appeared to confirm 16,000 job cuts that had not yet occurred.

The message, signed by Colleen Aubrey, a senior vice president overseeing applied AI solutions at AWS, told employees in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica that affected staff had already been notified. It also included an invitation to a team-wide meeting, which employees later said was abruptly cancelled.

In the email, Aubrey wrote: “Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”

Internally, the layoffs were referred to as “Project Dawn,” a name that circulated quickly among staff in Slack messages seen by Reuters.

Amazon has not publicly confirmed the scale or timing of the cuts and did not respond to the outlet’s request for comment.

The bungled communication comes amid a sweeping effort to reduce Amazon’s corporate headcount by around 30,000 roles, a plan first disclosed in October. The company has already eliminated roughly 14,000 positions and has warned that more reductions are likely.

While the total figure would represent a small fraction of Amazon’s 1.58 million global workforce, it amounts to nearly 10 per cent of its corporate staff.

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