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AWS Laying Off Hundreds in Effort To 'Streamline'
Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday confirmed to multiple outlets that it plans to lay off hundreds of its tech, sales and marketing staff.
In an internal e-mail obtained by GeekWire, AWS senior vice president Matt Garman positioned the layoffs as a way to make the cloud giant more "agile."
"We operate in an incredibly fast-moving industry, and it is important that we stay agile as an organization," Garman wrote, per GeekWire's reporting. He added, "The changes we are making are preparing the organization for the future, aligning with our strategy and priorities, and reducing duplication and inefficiency."
The reduction in AWS' headcount comes as AWS, the perennial leader in cloud computing, is experiencing a persistent slowdown in annual growth, especially compared to rival Microsoft Azure. It has also been slower to make inroads into the white-hot generative AI space than Microsoft, though recent developments -- from the ongoing expansion of the Amazon Bedrock platform to its $4 billion investment in LLM maker Anthropic -- have begun to move the needle more in Amazon's favor.
Nevertheless, there have been murmurings that AWS has been preparing to cut staff this year. A report by The Information last December said Garman was planning to "consolidate teams that developed conflicting sales strategies and change how AWS assigns technical staff to help customers, among other things, after some of those clients expressed dissatisfaction with its current practices." At that time, AWS headcount was around 60,000 people.
Wednesday's news signals a decrease in that number by several hundred. Per GeekWire, the cuts will affect AWS' sales, marketing and global services teams, particularly roles involved with training and certification. Staff in AWS' Physical Stores Technology team will also be affected.
In a statement to multiple media outlets, AWS explained that it has "identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline in order to continue focusing our efforts on the key strategic areas that we believe will deliver maximum impact."