Amazon confirmed it cut fewer than 1,000 white-collar workers from its Stores unit on Wednesday, even as the company ran its Prime Big Deal Days promotional event. The reductions follow a larger round of 30,000 job cuts that began last year.
Amazon confirmed on Wednesday that it had eliminated a small number of positions, primarily within its Stores unit — the division that oversees its main e-commerce platform — even as the company ran its Prime Big Deal Days promotional event.
The company let go fewer than 1,000 white-collar workers, according to a person familiar with the matter. Affected employees were located in the United States, India, and the United Kingdom, and some shared posts from internal Slack channels about the cuts.
"We've adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities," an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Internal communications indicated that several divisions within Stores were affected, including customer service and selling partner services, along with possibly other units across the company.
The reductions coincide with Prime Big Deal Days, one of Amazon's largest annual shopping promotions, which launched Tuesday and ran through Wednesday, offering varying discounts across the platform.
The layoffs are the latest in a series of smaller workforce reductions following a larger round of 30,000 job cuts that began last year and continued into January. Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos addressed the earlier round in a Fox News interview aired Wednesday, attributing the cuts to aggressive overhiring during the pandemic.
"People were staying home and they were ordering, and it was an incredible, stressful period for us, by the way," Bezos said. "The whole team worked extremely hard and did so much, but we really grew our head count."
The acknowledgment underscores the challenge that Amazon — along with much of the broader technology sector — has faced in right-sizing workforces that expanded rapidly between 2020 and 2022, only to encounter slower growth and margin pressure in subsequent years.
Business Insider earlier reported the layoffs before Amazon's official confirmation.
The timing of the cuts, landing mid-promotion during one of the company's highest-traffic retail windows, reflects the degree to which operational restructuring has become a routine exercise at Amazon rather than a crisis response, signaling that leadership views workforce adjustments and customer-facing business activity as largely parallel tracks.
TechEchelon Staff bylines are produced collectively by the newsroom for short, breaking, and wire-style coverage. Longer-form reporting is published under the responsible reporter's name.
More from the Staff →Research firm New Constructs has valued Anthropic at $150 billion and labeled its planned Nasdaq listing the "most ridiculous IPO of 2026," citing a $42 billion net loss in 2025 and growing competition from open-source AI models.
SpaceX is seeking $40 billion in financing to buy additional Nvidia GPUs, as the FCC simultaneously announced plans to auction 25 megahertz of prime satellite spectrum that could benefit both SpaceX and Amazon's growing direct-to-device businesses.
Apollo Capital Management and a group of banks are in preliminary talks to help SpaceX finance a $40 billion purchase of Nvidia GPUs, with the deal expected to rely on investment-grade debt and use the chips themselves as collateral.
Written for readers who already know the basics — markets, AI, and the policy decisions that shape both.