Amazon has begun laying off workers at its cloud and HR divisions, after announcing 9,000 job cuts earlier this year - which came after 18,000 layoffs in the months before then.
The company has started notifying employees in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica whether they have been laid off. Employees in countries with stronger labor laws will learn their fate in the months to come.
"As you know, we recently made the difficult decision to eliminate some roles across Amazon globally, including within AWS," Amazon CEO and former AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in an internal memo published by CNBC.
"It is a tough day across our organization. I fully realize the impact on every person and family who is affected. We are working hard to treat everyone impacted with respect, and to provide a number of resources and touchpoints to aid in this transition. This also includes packages that include a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support."
Selipsky said that the cloud business had grown significantly and that the employee count had ballooned to meet the demand. Now, however, with a troubled economy, he said that "it is critical that we focus on identifying and putting our resources behind our top priorities."
Along with layoffs, teams have been reprioritized and shifted to projects that will help the bottom line, he said. "The fundamentals and the outlook for our business are strong, and we are very confident in our long-term prospects. We are the leading cloud provider by a wide range of benchmarks, from our feature set to our security capabilities to our operational performance... I am optimistic about the future."
The company did not disclose which parts of AWS were impacted, but the professional services arm - which helps enterprises with cloud issues - is believed to be among those cut. The company also laid off AWS employees during the previous round of cuts.
Shares in Amazon rose around three percent with the latest layoffs. The company is set to announce its first-quarter earnings later today (see Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure's results here).
