Amazon has confirmed another major round of job cuts, affecting around 16,000 employees across the company. While leaders describe the move as part of a long-term effort, stories from workers and others provide a harsher image of how the layoffs took place.
Beth Galetti, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, announced the layoffs, saying that the company has been trying to reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy. According to her, some teams completed these changes last year, while others only finished recently. “I recognise this is difficult news,” she wrote, adding that Amazon will continue hiring in “strategic areas” and that broad layoffs every few months are “not our plan.”
For those affected in the US, Amazon is offering 90 days to find another role internally, along with severance pay, health benefits, and job placement support if they leave. On paper, the process sounds structured and supportive. But for many employees, the reality felt cold and chaotic.
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On LinkedIn, Dwijen Desai, a Software Development Engineer at AWS, shared that he was laid off after nearly six years. He wrote that he was proud of his work on “the backbone of the cloud.” Now, he says, he is “#OpenToWork” and looking for SDE II roles.
Some teams were wiped out completely. Senior Software Development Engineer at Amazon, Yi Shen, shared that after almost eight years at Amazon, he was laid off. “After almost 8 incredible years at Amazon, I (and my entire team) was impacted by the latest round of layoffs today.”
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Outside voices have been even more critical. Workforce strategist Amanda Goodall described the layoffs as “pretty ugly.” On X, she claimed employees had half-working access, erased calendars, locked inboxes, and work alerts still paging after their jobs were gone. “This isn’t performance-based,” she wrote, adding that “top performers” and “profitable teams” were hit.”
Goodall also pointed to troubling timing, saying cuts happened just before vesting periods and that remote workers were among the first affected. “This is what efficiency looks like in practice,” she wrote. “Maximum silence, minimum explanation, zero accountability.”
While Amazon insists the changes are about building for the future, the human cost is clear.
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