Amazon has begun another round of corporate job reductions, trimming fewer than 1,000 white-collar roles mostly in its Stores division, with employees in India, the UK and the US among those affected.
The cuts come on top of nearly 30,000 jobs eliminated across the company since late 2025, and land during Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days event, with staff learning of the changes through internal Slack channels. The company has confirmed the layoffs but has not published an exact figure, saying only that the restructuring is meant to align the Stores business with its priorities.
For India, where Amazon employs roughly 1.2 lakh people, the latest round deepens a difficult 12 months. Earlier rounds this cycle had already touched Amazon Web Services, including management roles. Previous layoffs in India, announced in October 2025 and January 2026, were estimated at 800 to 1,000 employees spread across finance, HR, marketing and technology functions.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has explained the broader reductions as a correction to pandemic-era over-hiring, when demand for online shopping surged, and Amazon expanded its workforce aggressively. As conditions normalised, the company has said it was left with more staff than it needed, and the current layoffs are being framed as part of a long-term effort to streamline operations rather than a response to falling demand.
The restructuring is also being linked to the company’s accelerating use of artificial intelligence inside its own operations. Routine work in software development and system maintenance is increasingly being handled by AI tools, freeing engineers to focus on more complex problems and shifting the mix of skills Amazon is hiring for.
CEO Andy Jassy told employees earlier in the year that Amazon’s corporate workforce would shrink over time as a result of efficiencies from AI, while Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, had written to employees that the company would “continue hiring in key strategic areas while also finding more places where we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realise efficiency gains.”
Affected staff in the earlier October 2025 round were kept on payroll for 90 days to apply internally or find new roles outside Amazon.
The latest cuts land at a moment when India’s technology and e-commerce sector is already navigating multiple white-collar layoff cycles. FICO announced a 15% workforce reduction tied to AI-driven restructuring in the same week, and global firms including Oracle and Microsoft have made similar moves through 2026.
