Worldwide, 1.5 million people worked for Amazon at the end of September, not including seasonal workers who work during the Christmas period, for example.
During the pandemic, massive staffing was still being recruited to meet the rising demand. Between the beginning of 2020 and the beginning of last year, the workforce had doubled.
But in the third quarter, the company saw its profit fall 9 percent compared to a year earlier. And for the last quarter, Amazon expects weak growth by company standards of between 2 and 8 percent.
The job losses at Amazon therefore seem to be the largest of the recent rounds of layoffs in the American technology sector. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced in November that it would lay off 11,000 people, or 13 percent of its workforce. Snapchat will have to leave 1,200 employees, or 20 percent.