Amazon to cut up to 14,000 corporate jobs

The Department of Enterprise has confirmed that it has received a notice from tech giant Amazon of its plan to make some staff at its Irish operation redundant.

This would form part of a major restructuring across its corporate workforce, with 14,000 jobs expected to be cut globally.

Sources said there would be some impact on jobs here, but reported figures of up to 150 have yet to be confirmed.

The Department said it has received a “collective redundancy notification from Amazon on 28th October 2025″, but did not disclose if the company had flagged how many cuts would be involved in the Amazon workforce here.

Amazon employs roughly 6,500 people in Ireland in roles that range from data engineering and operations management to finance.

The company recently shelved plans to build a big industrial plant at Ballycoolin in northwest Dublin, near the Co Meath border, because it could not secure an electricity supply for the €300 million project. That closed off the prospect of more than 500 jobs being created in the proposed plant.

The cuts are part of a wider attempt to pare expenses at the tech giant.

“The reductions we’re sharing today are a continuation of this work to get even stronger by further reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets and what matters most to our customers’ current and future needs,” Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon said Tuesday in a blog post.

Reuters earlier said the company was planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs, as the company compensates for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic.

The figure represents a small percentage of Amazon’s 1.55 million total employees, but nearly 10 per cent of its roughly 350,000 corporate employees. This would mark Amazon’s largest job cut since late 2022, when it started to eliminate around 27,000 positions.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the latest round of job cuts. Amazon has been trimming smaller numbers of jobs over the past two years across multiple divisions, including devices, communications and podcasting. The cuts beginning this week may affect a variety of divisions, including human resources; operations, devices and services; and Amazon Web Services, the people said.

Managers of impacted teams were asked to undergo training on Monday on how to communicate with staff following email notifications that will start going out on Tuesday morning, the sources said.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is undertaking an initiative to reduce what he has described as an excess of bureaucracy, including by reducing the number of managers. He installed an anonymous complaint line for identifying inefficiencies that has elicited some 1,500 responses and over 450 process changes, he said earlier this year. Mr Jassy said in June that the increased use of artificial intelligence tools would likely lead to further job cuts, particularly through automating repetitive and routine tasks.

The full scope of this round of job cuts was not immediately clear. The people familiar with the matter said the number could change over time as Amazon’s financial priorities shift. Fortune earlier reported that the human resources division could be targeted with a cut of roughly 15 per cent.

A programme begun early this year to bring employees back in the office five days per week, among tech’s most stringent, has failed to generate sufficient attrition, said two of the people, citing that as another reason for the size of the layoff. Some of the employees who are not swiping in daily because they live far from corporate offices, or for other reasons, are being told they have voluntarily quit Amazon and must leave without severance.

Layoffs.fyi, a website tracking tech job cuts, estimated that about 98,000 jobs have been lost so far this year among 216 companies. For all of 2024, the figure was 153,000. Amazon’s largest profit centre, cloud computing unit AWS, reported second-quarter sales of $30.9 billion, a 17.5 per cent increase that was well below gains of 39 per cent for Microsoft’s Azure and of 32% for Alphabet’s Google Cloud.

Estimates indicate that AWS will have boosted third-quarter sales by about 18 per cent to $32 billion, a slight slowdown from last year’s 19 per cent increase. AWS is still reeling from a roughly 15-hour internet outage last week that felled many of the most popular online services, like Snapchat and Venmo. Amazon appears to be expecting another big holiday selling season. It plans to offer 250,000 seasonal jobs to help staff warehouses, among other needs, the same as in the prior two years.

Amazon on Friday also announced a reorganisation of a segment of its PXT unit focused on diversity initiatives, a memo reviewed by Reuters showed. The changes largely involved promoting people to new roles. Amazon plans to report third-quarter earnings on Thursday. - Reuters, Bloomberg