Amazon bungles Wednesday layoff plan with misfired internal email

The Amazon logo is displayed at a news conference in New York on Sept. 28, 2011. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

Editor’s note: In a statement, an Amazon Canada spokesperson told CTV News that “the number provided is a global number of impacted corporate employees, however, I am not able to share specifics per country.”

SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon on Tuesday appeared to have prematurely alerted Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees to layoffs planned for Wednesday morning by sending a commiseration email and team-wide meeting invitation hours early.

Reuters reported on Friday that Amazon intended to lay off thousands of corporate employees starting this week. But the company has not yet informed impacted employees, nor has it confirmed the layoff plan.

The ⁠email sent on Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice-president of ‍applied AI solutions at AWS, wrongly said that impacted employees in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs.

In Slack messages viewed by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said the Wednesday meeting was almost immediately canceled. Amazon referred in the email to the layoffs as “Project Dawn.”

“Changes like this ​are hard on everyone,” Aubrey wrote in the email, reviewed by Reuters. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jobs ⁠in the company’s units covering AWS, retail, Prime Video and human resources were slated to be affected, people familiar with the matter told Reuters, though the full scope of this week’s cuts was unclear.

Amazon laid off about 14,000 people in October ⁠as part of a broader plan to reduce corporate staff by around 30,000, people familiar ‌with the matter said at the time.

On ‌Tuesday, Amazon cut jobs in its Fresh grocery and Go market divisions as it plans to close existing brick-and-mortar stores and convert some of them to Whole Foods stores. It ⁠did not disclose the number of affected employees.

The size of the cuts to be announced on Wednesday remained unclear. The full 30,000 jobs flagged in October would represent a small portion of Amazon’s 1.58 million employees, but nearly 10 per cent of the firm’s corporate workforce.

Amazon, ‌in an October blog post, tied ‍those job cuts to the increased use of artificial intelligence. That post from the head of human resources, Beth Galetti, indicated more job cuts were likely in the future.

The errant email Tuesday referred to a blog post by Galetti, ‍which has not yet appeared on ‌Amazon’s website.

By Greg Bensinger

(Reporting by Greg Bensinger; Editing by Jamie Freed and Cynthia Osterman)