According to the NYT, the total number of layoffs is still 'fluid'.
The Amazon devices division, which includes Alexa, will be the main target of the downsizing.
Between April and September, Amazon decreased its employee count by about 80,000.

In a report published on Monday, The New York Times stated that Amazon intended to fire 10,000 workers from 'business and technical jobs beginning as soon as this week.' Even though the NYT stated in its report that the total number of layoffs is 'fluid,' the 10,000 people who could be let go represent less than 1% of Amazon's more than 1.5 million hourly-only employees worldwide and about 3% of its corporate staff.

The report stated that the cuts would primarily affect Amazon's device division, which includes voice assistant Alexa, as well as its retail division and human resources. The layoffs at Amazon come just weeks after Elon Musk, the billionaire new owner of Twitter, cut the social media company's workforce in half and Meta said it would fire 11,000 workers, or 13 percent, of its workforce.

The news of impending layoffs at Amazon also surfaced on the same day Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told CNN he intended to donate the majority of his $124 billion (roughly Rs. 10,04,100 crore) fortune to charity within his lifetime.

The NYT reported that between April and September, the tech giant cut its headcount by almost 80,000 people, primarily by attrition among its hourly workforce. This indicated troubled times at Amazon.

Several smaller teams at Amazon stopped hiring in September. It stopped filling over 10,000 open positions in its primary retail business in October. The company's cloud computing division's hiring was put on hold for the upcoming few months when it announced a two-week hiring freeze across the board.

The COVID-19 pandemic years, which saw exponential increase in online consumer spending, were Amazon's 'most profitable age on record,' but when the bullwhip of the epidemic broke, its growth dropped to the lowest pace in two decades. The software firm doubled its staff in two years during the epidemic years as people flocked to online shopping and businesses raced to Amazon's cloud computing services, and it invested its wins in 'growth and experimentation to find the next great things.' But as the world recovered from the pandemic and consumers cut down on online buying, Amazon was hit hard by the consequences of overinvesting and expanding quickly, while shifts in consumer behaviour and high inflation hurt revenues.