Amazon to cut roughly 16,000 roles in early 2026, bringing cumulative job losses to nearly 30,000 (including ~14,000 cut in late 2025)
Amazon is gearing up for another big round of layoffs, planned to cut roughly 16,000 additional white-collar roles in January 2026.
After cutting about 14,000 jobs in late 2025, the company's cumulative job losses will be nearly 30,000—roughly 10% of its corporate staff (that's out of a total corporate team of 350K worldwide).
Major teams hit: AWS, Retail, Prime Video
This wave will impact some of Amazon's biggest divisions—think Amazon Web Services (AWS), Retail, Prime Video, and HR.
The goal? To simplify how things work.
With these cuts, Amazon's total job reductions since early 2022 will top 27K.
A peek behind the decision
CEO Andy Jassy says the layoffs aren't about money troubles or AI taking over jobs—instead, it's about trimming extra management layers that piled up during the pandemic boom.
Interestingly, an anonymous feedback project inside Amazon got around 1,500 responses and sparked changes to over 450 processes as part of this shake-up.