Amazon has begun laying off employees, amid reports this week that the tech giant is planning to cut 10,000 jobs.
LinkedIn posts by workers affected by the cuts were first reported on by the BBC, and could be the start of layoffs that affect 3% of Amazon’s office staff.
The posts on LinkedIn appeared to show jobs were being cut across divisions, including Amazon’s Alexa business, Lab126 which runs the Kindle e-reader, and the Luna cloud gaming platform.
Amazon introduced a hiring freeze earlier this month and has also canceled projects such as a personal delivery robot, as difficult economic conditions and falling online sales hurt its core business.
Amazon chairman and founder Jeff Bezos also warned that the U.S. economy was sending warning signs to “batten down the hatches.” Amazon’s share price has fallen more than 40% so far this year.
Also last month, CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company was seeing signs that consumers were beginning to feel the effects of inflation. “We are preparing for what could be a slower growth period,” Olsavsky told reporters following the company’s third-quarter earnings results.
If the layouts go ahead at the scale being reported, it would be biggest cut in workforce in the company’s history. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, Amazon slashed 1,300 jobs, or 15% of its staff.
The company is still planning to hire 150,000 employees for the holiday shopping period, the same number it added last year.
A number of the larger tech companies have made cuts in recent weeks. Twitter laid off half its workforce not long after Elon Musk bought the company, and Facebook’s parent company Meta cut 13% of its staff soon after. Microsoft, Salesforce, Shopify and Stripe have also laid off employees in recent weeks, as technology companies have felt the effects of a looming recession, massive inflation and other unfavorable economic conditions.