"Staff at Amazon are still reeling from a fresh round of layoffs that saw thousands of corporate workers lose their job as execs appeared to sacrifice employees for their topline. In a memo to all Amazon workers, Beth Galetti, the company's senior vice president of HR, bragged that "some may ask why we're reducing roles when the company is performing well.""
"Mileage may vary. The layoffs from earlier this week came hot on the heels of an unprecedented Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that took out a major chunk of the world internet, from Snapchat to ChatGPT. Early financial loss estimates say the damages from that could amount to over half a billion dollars when all the dust settles. Those bad optics were compounded by prior rounds of layoffs over the summer, specifically in AWS's cloud computing unit, which lost hundreds of employees."
"In July, AWS CEO Andy Jassy enthused that "generative AI and agents" were changing "the way work is done" in the company's internet services division - though it remains to be seen if the tech is truly up for the task. After that drama, many online seem to be connecting new outages to AWS. Case in point, today thousands of users on Downdetector started reporting what they said was another AWS outage that they said was affecting services across the web."
Thousands of Amazon corporate employees were laid off in a recent reduction that executives framed as efficiency moves tied to AI-driven transformation. Senior HR leader Beth Galetti described current AI as the most transformative technology since the internet and said it enables faster innovation. The layoffs followed a major AWS outage that disrupted services including Snapchat and ChatGPT and prompted early loss estimates exceeding half a billion dollars. AWS previously reduced hundreds of cloud-unit jobs over the summer. Thousands of users reported a new outage on Downdetector, but Amazon said AWS services were operating normally and blamed an issue at another provider, Microsoft Azure.
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