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Amid much speculation about the number of rumoured job cuts, some 14,000 Amazon employees finally discovered they had been laid off on Tuesday morning, not in a meeting or on a video call, but via text message.
According to Business Insider, the company sent two automated messages to employees shortly after email notifications went out. One message urged recipients to check their personal or work email before arriving at the office, while a second instructed them to call a help desk if they had not yet received an email “about your role.”
The texts were apparently sent early in the morning, before office hours. The move, sources said, was designed to prevent affected workers from arriving at work and finding their badges disabled.
Tech-driven communication or human disconnect?
The approach forms part of Amazon’s decision to cut approximately 14,000 roles this week, largely among retail managers in the US. It had been speculated via many news outlets that the number of redundancies could be as high as 30,000.
HR chief Beth Galetti said in an internal memo that the company aimed to “streamline operations” and “innovate much faster” as it adapts to the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence.
Employees affected by the layoffs will receive full pay and benefits for 90 days, along with severance, according to Galetti’s message, which was also shared on internal Slack channels.
In a blog post, she wrote that AI was “the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet” and that it was enabling companies “to innovate much faster than ever before.”
Yet the decision to deliver news of job losses by text has drawn wider attention than the layoffs themselves, echoing recent patterns at companies including Google and Tesla, where employees have discovered they were locked out of systems before receiving official confirmation of their dismissal.
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While the company has not commented on the messages, the cuts are part its move toward increasing automated workforce processes. The online retail giant hired aggressively during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when demand for online shopping hit new heights, but as consumer habits normalized, it has faced pressure to scale back and refocus on efficiency.
While the planned job cuts represent a small share of Amazon’s global headcount of 1.55 million, they demonstrate the impact that the adoption of AI is having, particularly in the tech sector.
