PALO ALTO, California – Amazon.com on Wednesday said it has laid off some employees in its devices group, with a person familiar with the company saying it is still targeting around 10,000 job cuts, including in its retail and human resources divisions.

The announcement was Amazon’s first since media outlets including Reuters reported its layoff plans on Monday. It heralded a dramatic shift for a company known for its job creation and added shape to the latest dismissals befalling the technology sector.

Mr Dave Limp, Amazon’s head of devices and services, said in a blog post that the company had decided to consolidate teams in its devices unit, which popularised speakers that consumers command via speech. It notified staff it laid off on Tuesday.

“We continue to face an unusual and uncertain macroeconomic environment,” he said. “In the light of this, we have been working over the last few months to further prioritise what matters most to our customers and the business.”

Plans – still in flux – to eliminate about 10,000 roles through reductions in more units would amount to about a 3 per cent cut in Amazon’s roughly 300,000-strong corporate workforce. It has offered voluntary buyouts to some human resources staff, the source familiar with its job cut plans said.

For years, the online retailer aimed to make Alexa, the voice assistant that powers the gadgets it sells, ubiquitous and present to place any shopping order, even though it was unclear how widely users had embraced it for more complex tasks than checking the news or weather.

A project inspired by a talking computer in science fiction show Star Trek, Alexa had garnered headcount that grew to 10,000 people by 2019. At the time, Amazon touted sales of more than 100 million Alexa devices, a figure it has since not refreshed publicly. Founder Jeff Bezos later said the company often sold Alexa devices at a discount and sometimes below cost.

While Amazon has toiled to encode intelligent answers to any question Alexa might expect from users, Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI have had breakthroughs in chatbots that could respond like a human without any hand holding.

Dozens of individuals posted on professional networking site LinkedIn to say that Amazon had laid them off, among them those who claimed to work on privacy for Alexa and software for the company’s cloud gaming service, Luna.

Following the layoff news, shares pared losses and closed down about 2 per cent.

About-face

The news follows Facebook parent Meta Platforms’ announcement last week to cut 11,000 jobs, on top of layoffs at Twitter, Microsoft, Snap and others.

In September 2021, Amazon had marketed 55,000 corporate roles globally during a career fair, an increase dwarfed only by hiring in its fulfilment centres. In short order, the online bookseller that Mr Bezos envisioned on a road trip not 30 years before had become America’s second-largest private employer, with more than 1.5 million workers including warehouse staff.

The turn has been abrupt. The retailer is responding to sales that could rise as little as 2 per cent this holiday season, compared with a 38 per cent increase two years ago. Its chief financial officer said in October that consumers had tighter budgets in the face of inflation and higher fuel costs.

Its cloud computing division, a profit engine for the company, likewise has increased revenue more slowly quarter after quarter in the past year, when adjusted for foreign exchange.

Chief executive Andy Jassy, who ascended to the role in 2021, has focused on cutting costs and stemming Amazon’s 43 per cent share price drop this year to date.

Under his tenure, Amazon announced the end of its virtual healthcare service for employers and pruning of its much-hyped autonomous sidewalk delivery programme. It froze incremental corporate hiring as well. REUTERS