• Amazon is continuing with its layoff plans, with employees at AWS the latest to be hit.
• Reports tell of hundreds of jobs in the sales and marketing divisions of AWS cut.
• The latest cuts come as demand for Amazon’s cloud computing slows down drastically amid a worldwide spending slow down.

No stranger to mass layoffs across its ecommerce business, Amazon is now set to axe hundreds of jobs at the cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services (AWS). These latest cuts will see employees in sales and marketing departments affected as the company engages in Zuckerberg-like “streamlining.”

This round of layoffs comes after the company, the worldwide leader in ecommerce with a market cap nearing $2 trillion, announced sweeping layoffs at the end of 2022 and throughout 2023. As many as 27 000 employees were fired by the company following a hiring boom during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ve identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline in order to continue focusing our efforts on the key strategic areas that we believe will deliver maximum impact,” an AWS spokesperson said in a statement seen by Bloomberg.

Recently, Amazon has also seen jobs slashed in teams behind its disastrous voice assistant Alexa, Prime Video, health care and music divisions. Even streaming leader Twitch saw job cuts in order to placate the profit-seeking goals of Amazon, its owner.

The recent cuts to AWS however have been spurred by a slowing in AWS growth. During the pandemic, the cloud computing arm enjoyed an enormous boom in profits as millions were forced to look towards the cloud to keep their businesses afloat during worldwide lockdowns.

But as the world left the pandemic behind, and is now dealing with wide-ranging consumer hesitance and businesses looking to spend less on advancing their tech due to a global economic slowdown, AWS has felt the brunt.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that it would be killing its careless shopping system from Amazon Fresh grocery stores in the US, replacing the system with an automated grocery cart. At it height, the “Just Walk Out” tech was deployed at 20 Amazon Go stores and 40 Amazon Fresh outlets, many in airports and sports stadiums.