Amazon layoff details Will cut 18,000; Salesforce plans 10% reduction

Amazon has publicly confirmed for the first time it will cut about 18,000 roles in its corporate workforce, including cuts that started in November. The company had previously said it would reduce its workforce but did not offer many details of the size of the cuts.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a message Wednesday to employees that most of the cuts would occur in the retail and human-resources divisions. “Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so,” he wrote.

Amazon said it would tell some employees affected by the cuts beginning Jan. 18. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Amazon’s news came just after the cloud-computing giant Salesforce said it would lay off thousands of employees. Like many tech companies, it is dealing with waning growth after booming sales during the pandemic.

The news from Amazon and Salesforce is the latest development in a growing list of Big Tech firms that have slashed their workforces ahead of a possible recession. Facebook parent Meta announced last fall that it will lay off 11,000 workers, and the video streaming company Vimeo said Wednesday that it would lay off about 11% of its staff, or about 140 people, “due to the uncertain economic environment.” Other Big Tech companies have instituted hiring freezes — all a dramatic turnabout from the past decade of explosive growth in Silicon Valley.

Salesforce, which owns the popular workplace chat tool Slack and counts Ford, GE Appliances and Humana among its customers, will cut 10% of its workforce and scale back its office space to reduce costs, the company said Wednesday, adding thousands of workers to the expanding group of tech workers laid off in recent months. “As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that,” Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff wrote in an email to employees.

Salesforce employees in the United States would get nearly five months of severance pay and benefits, Benioff wrote.

The software maker, whose tools for sales and customer service have made it one of the most high-profile cloud-computing companies, has more than 79,000 employees, meaning the layoffs could affect nearly 8,000 people. In addition to Benioff’s email, the company revealed the layoff plans in a regulatory filing.

Salesforce grew its employee base significantly during the pandemic, skyrocketing from more than 49,000 at the end of January 2020 to more than 79,000 now. Even after the cuts, it will have more employees than it did when the pandemic started.

Its other co-CEO, Bret Taylor, recently announced he will leave the company at the end of this month.