Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce platform, has announced that it will cut nearly 16,000 jobs from its companies worldwide.

This is the second major workforce reduction by the company in the last three months. The company has said that it will close its remaining physical stores, grocery stores and Go Markets. The technology ‘Amazon One’, which allows customers to pay by scanning their palms, is also going to be closed.

Amazon had previously reported that it had cleared about 14,000 positions in October 2025. With the latest cuts, more than 30,000 jobs have been lost from Amazon. The company’s senior vice president Beth Galeti said in a memo, “Our goal is to improve efficiency by reducing positions and systems that are hindering the speed of work and decision-making.”

Amazon also cut about 27,000 employees in 2022 and 2023. According to Reuters, this was interpreted as a move to adjust the number of positions expanded in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Amazon claims that many of the hirings were made because the online shopping market grew rapidly at that time.

However, the company has not only laid off employees from its online unit but also from units such as Amazon Web Services, Alexa voice assistant, Prime Video, delivery, advertising, etc. The company currently employs 1.58 million people.

Not only Amazon, but other large technology companies have also been laying off employees in droves for the past few years. They have been calling this a ‘regular restructuring’. Microsoft had laid off about 9,000 employees from various branches and production units in 2025. According to the Times of India, Intel has also cut about 22,000 employees in a few years. The company has made this public as an effort to restructure its semiconductor business.

Meta has also been cutting thousands of jobs in departments such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Reality Labs, according to Reuters. Google is cutting hundreds of employees in various departments and reinvesting in AI and the cloud. Overall, more than 100,000 tech workers were laid off worldwide in 2025. Business Today estimates that the cuts have had a serious impact on tech workers in the US, Canada, India and Europe.

Analysts believe that the current wave of layoffs is not just a result of financial pressures, but also a sign of a restructuring focused on technology and AI. “Companies are reducing the roles that old, manual and AI can perform to increase investment in AI and automation,” says Bloomberg analyst Roger Lee. “This has increased the risk of replacement in roles such as general and routine administrative and software engineering.”

Some labor market experts say that AI tools could replace some entry-level workers, changing the structure of employment. A study by McKinsey Global has stated that by 2030, about 800 million jobs are at risk of being replaced by AI. However, AI has already created 1.3 million new jobs, according to the World Economic Forum, citing LinkedIn data. The forum’s January 15 report states that the demand for AI engineers and data workers is increasing.

The World Economic Forum’s ‘The Future of Jobs Report’ published in 2025 states that 170 million new jobs will be created within this decade. The report states that new jobs based mainly on technology, renewable and clean energy, economic and demographic changes are restructuring the global labor market. ‘Newly created jobs will account for 14 percent of existing jobs,’ the report says, ‘and 92 million jobs are being replaced.’