It’s been a brutal week when it comes to layoffs.
On Monday, shoe giant Nike announced it would lay off 775 employees, and on Tuesday, Pinterest announced it would lay off around 15% of its workforce. The same day, UPS announced 30,000 job cuts.
Now Amazon is also joining their ranks with the announcement today of mass layoffs. Here’s what you need to know.
What’s happened?
On Wednesday, Amazon announced that it was eliminating 16,000 positions across its workforce. The company has around 1.5 million workers worldwide.
In an unfortunate event, on Tuesday, Amazon accidentally sent an email to employees referencing the layoffs before they had been communicated to staff. But now the company has made the layoff announcement official.
In a blog post on its website, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, reposted the message sent to Amazon employees earlier in the day.
In that message, Galetti said the layoffs “will impact approximately 16,000 roles” at the company. Galetti did not state which divisions would be most impacted by the layoffs. However, the senior VP did note that Amazon will be offering most U.S.-based employees who are affected by the layoffs a chance to look for a new position within the company for the next 90 days.
Galetti also stated that Amazon will “continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future.”
Why is Amazon laying off so many workers?
Galetti didn’t go into detail as to the exact reasons why Amazon is laying off so many workers, other than stating that the company is looking to strengthen itself “by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”
However, she did reference the company’s earlier mass layoffs.
In October 2025, Amazon announced an earlier round of job cuts, eliminating 14,000 corporate roles at the company. At the time, Galetti said those cuts were the result of CEO Andy Jassy’s September 2024 directive to strengthen Amazon’s culture and teams.
“The reductions we’re sharing today,” Galetti wrote when announcing the 2025 layoffs, “are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs.”
At the time, Galetti also stated that Amazon needed to become a leaner company with “fewer layers”—an outlook apparently reached in part due to the rise of artificial intelligence.
“The world is changing quickly,” Galetti wrote in October. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones).”
Galetti again echoed the theme of a rapidly changing world in her memo today.
“Just as we always have, every team will continue to evaluate the ownership, speed, and capacity to invent for customers, and make adjustments as appropriate,” she stated. “That’s never been more important than it is today in a world that’s changing faster than ever.”
Amazon also closing stores
But Amazon isn’t stopping with just layoffs this week. Yesterday, the company announced it was shutting down two of its physical retail store chains. On Tuesday, the company said it would close all of its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go grocery stores.
“After a careful evaluation of the business and how we can best serve customers, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores, converting various locations into Whole Foods Market stores,” the company said.
As with the layoffs, the closure of its Go and Fresh stores signifies Amazon is being relentless in its pursuit of cost-cutting and reallocating portions of its business in order to cut operational costs and boost its bottom line.
How has Amazon’s stock reacted?
After announcing the closure of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores yesterday, Amazon.com, Inc. stock price (Nasdaq: AMZN) closed up about 2.6% for the day, with AMZN shares finishing at $244.68.
As of this writing, AMZN shares seem relatively unaffected by the layoff announcement. Currently, Amazon’s stock is up about three-tenths of a percent in premarket trading.
The company’s stock price has already had a small but healthy return in 2026 so far. As of yesterday’s close, AMZN shares were up 6% for the year.
But over the past 12 months, Amazon’s stock has underperformed the broader Nasdaq Composite, which is up over 23% since this time last year, according to Yahoo Finance. By contrast, Amazon shares are up less than 4% over the same period.
Investors will be eagerly awaiting the results of Amazon’s all-important holiday quarter when it reports its Q4 2025 earnings on February 5.