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Amazon has told workers of a fresh round of global job cuts in an email that appears to have been sent in error.
Workers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) received a meeting invitation from a top executive on Tuesday for the following day – subsequently cancelled – that also contained a draft email.
The message erroneously said the affected employees in the US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been told that they had lost their jobs.
It was signed by Colleen Aubrey, the senior vice-president of applied AI solutions at the company’s cloud computing arm AWS, while the layoffs were referred to in the email as “Project Dawn”.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Aubrey wrote in the email, which was seen by multiple news outlets including Reuters and Bloomberg. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organisation and AWS for future success.”
The email referred to a separate message from Amazon’s human resources boss, which did not appear to have been sent.
Amazon had announced in October it was cutting 14,000 corporate roles, as part of a wave of cuts that put tens of thousands of jobs at risk.
In recent days, several media outlets had reported that the Seattle-based online retail multinational was planning a second round of layoffs, however this has not been confirmed by the company.
Amazon has been trying to reverse a pandemic hiring spree in an effort to cut costs and slim down its huge operation, which employs about 1.5 million people worldwide. Its cloud computing and stores units were reported to be the divisions that would be hit in the latest round of layoffs.
Amazon’s chief executive, Andy Jassy, has previously warned white-collar workers at the company that their jobs could be taken by AI in the next few years.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The news of fresh Amazon layoffs came as the US delivery company United Parcel Service (UPS) said it would cut up to 30,000 jobs this year, adding to last year’s job reductions, as it focuses on higher-margin shipments.
UPS has been working to slash millions of low-value deliveries it carries out for Amazon, which is its largest customers but increasingly also a delivery rival. UPS has called its business with Amazon “extraordinarily dilutive” to margins.
