Amazon's recent wave of layoffs has caught the world by surprise, with the company announcing large-scale terminations in 2022 affecting 18,000 employees, and another round more recently impacting 9,000 more. While the initial layoffs at Amazon affected various departments including retail, devices, recruiting, and human resources, the latest round reportedly targeted employees from the ads business, cloud computing, Twitch livestreaming, and HR teams.

According to a CNBC report, Amazon has now begun laying off employees from its advertising team, as confirmed in an internal memo. Amazon's senior vice president of advertising, Paul Kotas, notified employees about the recent round of layoffs. The memo was shared with the publication by an Amazon spokesperson.

"As Andy shared a few weeks ago, throughout the 2023 planning process, we’ve been scrupulously prioritising resources with an eye toward maximising benefits to customers and the long-term health of our business. For Ads, this process has involved reallocating resources by shifting team members, slowing down or stopping certain programs, or concluding we didn’t have the right skills in place to address our priorities. As a result, we have made deeply-considered decisions about how best to move forward, resulting in role eliminations for a small percentage of our organisation," an excerpt from the memo reads.

Regarding the severance package for affected employees, Kotas mentioned that those who were laid off would receive "full pay and benefits for the next 60 days." However, employees based in New York and New Jersey will be eligible for benefits for 90 days.

"Those affected will receive full pay and benefits for the next 60 days (90 days if in New York and New Jersey), plus an additional severance package and outplacement support to help with finding their next role outside of Amazon," he wrote. The precise number of employees who have been terminated has not been disclosed.

In a recent letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy outlined his vision for the company and highlighted several cost-cutting measures, including the "difficult decision of eliminating 27,000 positions." Jassy explained that this decision was taken as part of the company's effort to reprioritise its resource allocation.

"We also reprioritised where to spend our resources, which ultimately led to the hard decision to eliminate 27,000 corporate roles. There are a number of other changes that we’ve made over the last several months to streamline our overall costs, and like most leadership teams, we’ll continue to evaluate what we’re seeing in our business and proceed adaptively," the letter read, as per a report by India Today. 

Jassy further revealed that Amazon will be implementing a policy requiring employees to work from the office at least three days a week starting from May, underscoring the significance of in-person work at the company.

Since Amazon's announcement of widespread employee layoffs, LinkedIn has been filled with stories of people sharing their experiences of job loss, job searching, and networking with others. One Amazon employee took to the professional social networking platform last month to express her anguish at losing coworkers, describing it as "gut-wrenching." 

While she acknowledged the company's need to cut costs, she expressed frustration with the layoffs being stretched out over six months, which she described as "torture." She concluded her post by urging the company to strive for improvement and do better.

The post read, "I'm currently in the People Experience & Tech (PXT) org at Amazon. We've been impacted by 3 separate rounds of layoffs since November. It's gut-wrenching to lose co-workers. As an added bonus, those of us that were fortunate enough to keep our jobs have had to absorb an unmanageable amount of work. I understand the need to cut costs, but dragging this out over 6 months is torture. Not pulling back on priorities with reduced staff demonstrates poor leadership. Amazon can and should do better."