Amazon accidentally sends email confirming layoffs

US technology giant Amazon has informed employees of a new round of global layoffs in an email apparently sent in error.

A draft email written by Colleen Aubrey, a senior vice president at Amazon Web Services (AWS), was included as part of a calendar invite sent by an executive assistant to a number of Amazon workers late on Tuesday.

In the email, Aubrey refers to a swathe of employees in the US, Canada and Costa Rica having been laid off as part of an effort to “strengthen the company.”

The message, which has been seen by the BBC, was apparently shared by mistake, as it was quickly cancelled. An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.

The title of the invite was “Send project Dawn email,” an apparent reference to Amazon’s code name for the job cuts.

While the email made clear that layoffs were happening at Amazon, employees had not yet been officially informed.

“This is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers,” the email said.

“Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success,” it added.

Amazon announced 14,000 job cuts in late October.

This second round of layoffs had been expected by Amazon employees for weeks, according to a former employee who asked not be identified.

The broad understanding among employees had been that bosses intended to cut a total of around 30,000 roles, added the former employee, who left the company as part of the cuts in October.

The firm was expected to reach that number of job cuts with another major round of layoffs this month, followed by further redundancies until the end of May.

While laid-off workers were invited to reapply for open positions at Amazon, the number of such roles was limited. People who did not move to another role received severance pay based on how long they had worked at the company.

Since 2022, major tech companies like Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft and others have slashed their workforces by laying off tens of thousands of people each year.

Across the entire tech industry, an estimated 700,000 people have been laid off over the last four years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts.

So far this year, Facebook owner Meta has cut more roles, impacting several hundred employees. As has Pinterest, which this week cut around 700 jobs.

Since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stood down as its chief executive four years ago, his successor Andy Jassy has led the company through several rounds of layoffs in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Jassy has also attempted to bring a more strict work culture to the firm.

In-office work is now mandatory five-days a week, making Amazon one of the only major tech companies to require its employees to be in the office full-time.

Amazon is also focused on reducing costs, even monitoring corporate mobile phone use by AWS employees, according to a report in Business Insider, in an effort to limit a long-standing $50 per month reimbursement.

In an email Jassy sent to employees before the Thanksgiving holiday viewed by the BBC, the CEO said he was thankful for the “challenges at opportunities at work” as “the world is changing at a very rapid rate.”

Jassy called this era at Amazon “a time to rethink everything we’ve ever done.”