Amazon is laying off another 16,000 corporate employees globally, the company confirmed Wednesday morning, the second phase in a restructuring that now totals 30,000 positions — marking the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history.

The company is “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy,” according to a memo to employees from Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology.

“While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now,” Galetti wrote.

The latest job cuts come after Amazon laid off about 14,000 workers in October. The company indicated at the time that more layoffs could occur in 2026 while noting it would continue to hire in key strategic areas.

In the new memo, Galetti sought to reassure employees that the company does not plan to make regular rounds of massive cuts. “Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm — where we announce broad reductions every few months,” she wrote. “That’s not our plan.” 

But she added that teams will continue to evaluate their operations and “make adjustments as appropriate,” saying that’s “never been more important than it is today in a world that’s changing faster than ever.”

Amazon on Tuesday announced that it will close all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh grocery store locations. Last night, the company began informing customers that it’s discontinuing its Amazon One biometric palm recognition service, as well. 

This week’s announcement, combined with the cuts in October, tops the 27,000 positions the company eliminated in 2023 across multiple rounds of layoffs.

The lworkforce reduction comes amid an efficiency push at the company. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who replaced founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, has cited a need to reduce bureaucracy and become more efficient in the new era of artificial intelligence. 

On the company’s third quarter earnings call, Jassy framed the layoffs in October as a push to stay nimble, and said Amazon’s rapid growth over the past decade led to extra layers of management that slowed decision-making. He has said he wants Amazon to operate like the “world’s largest startup.” 

Jassy also told employees in June that he expected Amazon’s total corporate workforce to shrink over time due to efficiency gains from AI.

Amazon’s corporate workforce numbered around 350,000 people in early 2023, the last time the company provided a public number. Amazon has an overall workforce of 1.57 million people, which includes workers in its warehouses.

The company employs around 50,000 corporate workers in the Seattle region, its primary headquarters. There were 2,303 corporate employees in Washington state that were laid off last year in October.

Amazon implemented a 5-day return-to-office policy at the beginning of last year for corporate employees, drawing pushback from some employees. The company’s workforce helps generate foot traffic for nearby small businesses near its office buildings. 

Jon Scholes, president of the Downtown Seattle Association, said that a “workforce change of this scale has ripple effects on the community.”

“The tech ecosystem has been a key driver to our city’s growth and bolstered the tax coffers, which helped fuel our city’s investments in housing, public safety and economic development the last 20 years or so,” he said in a statement. “As companies grapple with emerging trends, we hope this pain is short-term.”

Layoffs have hit various tech companies across the Seattle region over the past few years. Meta cut 331 positions earlier this month. Microsoft laid off more than 3,200 employees in Washington state last year, part of broader cuts that impacted 15,000 people globally. 

Amazon reports its latest quarterly earnings on Feb. 5. The company’s stock underperformed relative to the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants last year. Some analysts predict that Amazon’s cloud unit will help boost the stock as AI demand rises. The company, along with other tech giants, is investing heavily in AI-related infrastructure.

Amazon reported about $1.8 billion in estimated severance costs related to its 14,000 corporate layoff announced in October.

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it is eliminating approximately 16,000 roles across the company as part of organizational changes that began in October 2025 and are only now being finalized by certain teams. Senior Vice President Beth Galetti shared the news in a memo to employees, framing the reductions as an effort to reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy. The memo follows another memo that the company accidentally sent to employees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a consultation on potential new requirements for Google Search, including on the controls we provide to websites to manage their content in Search AI features.

We've been waiting months for our first look at Android running on a PC in Google's upcoming ChromeOS / Android hybrid platform, codenamed Aluminium OS. Now we've seen it in action, and have Google to thank for the leak.

9to5Google spotted a bug report related to Chrome Incognito tabs published to the Google Issue Tracker yesterday, including two screen recordings taken from a device running Aluminium OS. Google has now restricted access to the report, but 9to5Google managed to pull the videos first. The site also reports that the bug tracker mentioned an ALOS software version - already confirmed to be the initialism for Aluminium OS - and …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon appears to have prematurely acknowledged layoffs inside AWS after an internal email referencing "organizational changes" and "impacted colleagues" was mistakenly sent to cloud employees. CNBC reports: "Changes like this are hard on everyone," Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at Amazon Web Services, wrote in an email viewed by CNBC. "These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success." The note also references a post from Amazon's HR boss Beth Galetti and said the company notified "impacted colleagues in our organization." The subject of the email mentions "Project Dawn," and the email says it was "canceled," possibly indicating it was recalled by the sender after the fact. It's unclear what Project Dawn refers to. The job cuts come after Amazon announced in October that it would lay off 14,000 corporate employees. At the time, the company indicated the cuts would continue in 2026 as it found "additional places we can remove layers." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the layoffs were meant to reduce management layers and bureaucracy inside the company. He also predicted last June that efficiency gains from AI would shrink Amazon's corporate staff in the coming years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A data breach at SoundCloud exposed information tied to 29.8 million user accounts, according to Have I Been Pwned. While SoundCloud says no passwords or financial data were accessed, attackers mapped email addresses to public profile data and later attempted extortion. BleepingComputer reports: The company confirmed the breach on December 15, following widespread reports from users who were unable to access SoundCloud and saw 403 "Forbidden" errors when connecting via VPN. SoundCloud told BleepingComputer at the time that it had activated its incident response procedures after detecting unauthorized activity involving an ancillary service dashboard. "We understand that a purported threat actor group accessed certain limited data that we hold," SoundCloud said. "We have completed an investigation into the data that was impacted, and no sensitive data (such as financial or password data) has been accessed. The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles." While SoundCloud didn't provide further details regarding the incident, BleepingComputer learned that the breach affected 20% of all SoundCloud users, roughly 28 million accounts based on publicly reported user figures (SoundCloud later published a security notice confirming the information provided by BleepingComputer's sources). After the breach, BleepingComputer also learned that the ShinyHunters extortion gang was responsible for the attack, with sources saying that the threat group was also attempting to extort SoundCloud. This was confirmed by SoundCloud in a January 15 update, which said the threat actors had "made demands and deployed email flooding tactics to harass users, employees, and partners."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.