News
Cloud Giants Continue Waves of Massive Layoffs
Cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google continue to lay off tens of thousands of employees, with Amazon today announcing another 9,000 positions will be eliminated in the next few weeks.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the cuts will mostly affect AWS, People, Experience, and Technology (PXT), Advertising and Twitch in a March 20 post. In January Jassy announced the elimination of more than 18,000 positions, which followed cuts made late last year.
Jassy cited an "uncertain economy" and "uncertainty that exists in the near future" as reasoning behind the massive layoffs, with many industry sources and pundits speculating that there might be a recession in the offing.
Amazon seems to be leading the cloud giant pack in the race to eliminate employees, as Microsoft announced some 10,000 jobs were being cut just a couple weeks after Amazon's January post.
CEO Satya Nadella also noted the uncertainty, saying "We're also seeing organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one."
Two days after Nadella's announcement, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai jumped on the uncertainty bandwagon, announcing some 12,000 job cuts.
The massive layoffs have been attributed to a changing economy caused by the years-long COVID-19 pandemic that actually drove cloud computing growth, with one contributing factor being the huge work-from-home surge.
Pichai noted that in his address: "Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."
The layoffs are coming amid continuing strong jobs reports for the U.S.
As The New York Times reported just a week ago, "U.S. Job Growth Remains Solid."
But not in the clouds.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.