When boyfriend Divya Porwal landed in Bengaluru after his Diwali break, the first thing he saw wasn’t a festive greeting — it was an email from Amazon informing him he’d been fired.
“After his Diwali break, he boarded his flight back to Bengaluru, excited to be back,” Porwal wrote on X. “As soon as he landed, he turned on his phone – there it was. A dismissal email from Amazon.”
Her post is among dozens shared on social media this week after Amazon.com Inc confirmed plans to cut nearly 14,000 jobs at the company – one of the biggest rounds of layoffs in years. The move follows months of warnings from CEO Andy Jassy, who said artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly handle tasks once performed by human employees.
Shock and stories of loss
Another user, Siya, posted about a relative who lost his job on Tuesday.
“He’s been clubbing with his salary and his job… but I still feel bad for him and his family. He’s got a three-year-old and that must be really hard. It’s a reminder that no job is truly stable these days.”
A third user, Prapti, shared a chilling account of how the layoffs took place in real time:
“A friend of mine at Amazon told me she saw the whole team, including the manager, get fired right in front of her eyes. The test teams went first. The laptops were picked up on the spot – and that was it.”
Departments hit, AI in focus
In a blog post, Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, said:
“The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of that work to make us even stronger by further cutting red tape, removing layers and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets.”
The layoffs hit several divisions, including logistics, payments, video games and cloud computing, according to a Bloomberg report. Following the announcement, several Amazon employees took to internal chat rooms and social media to discuss which teams were affected, share reports they had received, and exchange tips on retrieving personal files before access to the system was revoked.
By the numbers
- 14,000 job cuts at companies (around 4% of the workforce)
- Number of Company Employees: 3,50,000
- Total number of employees: 1.55 million, mostly in warehouses
- Previous redundancies (2022–23): 27,000 roles
The latest cuts come after earlier reports suggested Amazon could cut up to 30,000 jobs, a range that would surpass its last major round of layoffs during its post-pandemic cost-cutting phase.
Bigger picture
Amazon says the restructuring is part of a broader effort to streamline operations and redirect investment in AI and cloud infrastructure — areas it sees as key to future growth.
But as stories of sudden terminations continue to flood social media, the layoffs have also reignited debate about how automation is reshaping Big Tech jobs.
