In 2025, Amazon once again became a central case study in how big tech reshapes its workforce during an era of artificial intelligence, automation, and cost cutting. After eliminating about 27,000 jobs in 2022 and 2023 following the post-pandemic slowdown, the company announced another major round of reductions: roughly 14,000 corporate roles worldwide tied to a broad organizational restructuring and an aggressive push into generative AI and cloud infrastructure.
Unlike some previous cycles that were announced in one burst, the 2025 story unfolded in stages. There was an early-year shock in Canada, where Amazon said it would shut down all of its warehouses in Quebec. Later, in October, came confirmation of a global corporate layoff plan that hit engineering, gaming, advertising, and support functions across North America, Europe, and Asia. Throughout the year, government filings, local reporting, and internal memos filled in the details.
This tracker brings together the verified pieces of that picture: what Amazon officially announced, what regulators and local authorities have documented, how regional impacts differ, and how 2025 compares to the earlier waves of cuts. It also links out to practical guides such as Can a Company Find Out If You Were Laid Off? and How to Form a Union Without Getting Fired for workers trying to navigate the aftermath.
Amazon’s 2025 Corporate Layoff Announcement
The defining moment of the year came in late October 2025, when Amazon confirmed that it would reduce its global corporate workforce by around 14,000 people. In a memo to employees, Beth Galetti, senior vice president for People Experience and Technology, framed the move as part of a push to “simplify operations” and reallocate resources toward high-priority areas, especially artificial intelligence, AWS infrastructure, and automation projects.
According to company statements and press coverage, the cuts amount to roughly 4% of Amazon’s corporate headcount. The company reported approximately 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of about 1.55–1.56 million worldwide before the reductions. Most affected corporate workers were told they would have around 90 days to look for internal roles before their employment ended, with severance, outplacement support, and extended health coverage offered to those who could not land a new position inside the company.
The October decision was widely described as one of the largest corporate-specific layoff rounds in Amazon’s history, though still smaller in raw numbers than the combined 27,000 job cuts carried out in 2022–2023. It also came in a broader U.S. labor environment where overall layoffs hit a two-decade October high, with analysts explicitly citing AI adoption and automation as key drivers across tech and warehousing.
Why Amazon Says It Is Cutting Jobs in 2025
Amazon has not framed the 2025 layoffs as a response to collapsing demand. The company’s retail business remains large and profitable, while AWS continues to grow and AI-related investments are accelerating. Instead, leadership has argued that the cuts are about changing the mix of spending: reducing layers of management, slowing hiring in mature areas, and moving capital and talent into cloud, data centers, robotics, and generative AI projects.
CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly said that generative AI will reshape how Amazon works internally and what it sells externally, including new AI services for AWS customers. Internal communications and public statements in 2025 emphasized that hundreds of AI initiatives are underway inside the company and that major, multi-billion-dollar data-center and campus investments are planned in several U.S. states. The message to investors was clear: Amazon is trading some human-intensive corporate functions for more automated, AI-driven systems.
For employees, however, the immediate reality is simpler and harsher. Roles are being consolidated; many mid-level and senior employees in engineering, product, HR, and operations are losing their jobs; and new AI tools are being rolled out simultaneously, changing the nature of surviving jobs and the skills demanded in future hiring.
North America: WARN Filings and Corporate Hubs
In the United States, state-level Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings provide some of the clearest snapshots of the 2025 cuts. Because companies above a certain size must file notices before large layoffs, these databases are a key source for concrete numbers and job-category breakdowns.
By late November 2025, analysis of WARN data across four key states—New York, California, New Jersey, and Washington—showed more than 4,700 Amazon corporate job cuts confirmed in those states alone. Follow-up reporting highlighted that nearly 40% of those identified roles were engineering positions, particularly mid-level software development engineers (often labeled SDE II). Product and program managers, as well as sales and marketing staff, were also hit hard.
In Washington State, Amazon’s home base, local outlets reported that about 2,300 management-level and corporate employees are slated to lose their jobs as part of the October restructuring, with separations scheduled across multiple dates stretching into 2026. Those cuts affect workers in Seattle’s South Lake Union campus, Bellevue, and other hubs across the state. Similar WARN filings identify hundreds of positions in California, including more than 1,400 roles in the Bay Area and other offices tied to engineering, UX, legal, and PR teams.
These figures do not capture every layoff across the U.S., because not all states require detailed breakdowns and some facilities fall outside WARN thresholds. But they do confirm that thousands of white-collar workers—especially engineers and other technical staff—lost positions in 2025, even as Amazon invests aggressively in AI-driven infrastructure.
Quebec: Closure of All Amazon Warehouses in the Province
One of the most dramatic regional decisions came far from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. On January 22, 2025, the company announced that it would close all seven of its warehouses in the Canadian province of Quebec over a roughly two-month period. The move effectively ended the company’s direct fulfillment operations in the province and eliminated approximately 1,700 permanent full-time jobs, alongside hundreds of seasonal and temporary positions.
Amazon said publicly that the closures were part of a plan to “provide more savings” to customers and to return to the third-party delivery model it used in Quebec before 2020, relying on local small businesses for logistics. However, unions, labor researchers, and many commentators quickly connected the decision to ongoing unionization efforts. In 2024, workers at Amazon’s DXT4 warehouse in Laval became the first Amazon warehouse employees in Canada to unionize, and a Quebec labor tribunal had ruled against the company over anti-union communications.
Labor organizations in Quebec have since filed complaints and launched campaigns arguing that the warehouse shutdowns amount to anti-union retaliation. Estimates from unions and policy groups suggest that, when subcontracted delivery workers are included, as many as 4,500 people may ultimately be affected by the exit from Quebec. Legal and political fallout from the closures was still unfolding at the end of 2025, making Quebec one of the most closely watched Amazon cases in the world for union rights.
Amazon Games and Other Business Unit Adjustments
The 2025 layoffs were not confined to traditional corporate support roles. Amazon’s gaming division—Amazon Games—was hit particularly hard. Internal memos and media reports in late October confirmed “significant role reductions” in game development and publishing teams, especially at studios in Irvine and San Diego and in central publishing groups.
Alongside job cuts, Amazon said it would halt a “significant amount” of first-party AAA and massively multiplayer online (MMO) development and pivot more aggressively toward titles that fit its Luna cloud gaming platform and Prime-integrated entertainment strategy. Support for some existing titles, including the MMO New World, is scheduled to wind down or shift into maintenance-only mode, with servers expected to stay online through 2026 but without the same level of active expansion.
At the same time, Amazon is continuing to fund a smaller portfolio of high-visibility external and internal projects, including a new Tomb Raider game developed in partnership with Crystal Dynamics, an open-world driving game from Maverick Games, and Luna-oriented party and AI-driven titles. The net effect is a leaner games organization with fewer full-time roles and a narrower strategic focus, mirroring the broader corporate pattern: fewer big, expensive internal bets and a tighter concentration on areas where Amazon believes it has structural advantages.
Beyond gaming, internal reports and WARN data show layoffs touching advertising, HR, recruiting, certain Alexa and devices teams, and experimental units. However, Amazon has not provided a public, department-by-department breakdown of the 14,000 corporate roles being eliminated.
Europe, Asia, and Other Regions: Global Cuts With Limited Detail
Because the 14,000 figure refers to global corporate jobs, it necessarily includes employees outside North America. Amazon operates major technical and corporate hubs in Europe and Asia, including in the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, India, and Japan. Local press in several of these countries reported role reductions tied to the October announcement, often affecting engineering, finance, and HR functions.
However, as of December 2025, Amazon has not published a country-by-country breakdown of the international cuts, and many labor regimes do not provide the same level of publicly searchable data as U.S. WARN systems. That means the non-North American picture is incomplete: workers and journalists know that cuts happened, but they lack precise headcounts for each office or team.
For anyone tracking Amazon layoffs outside the U.S. and Canada, the most reliable information comes from local news reports, union statements, and occasional company comments in national media. What those sources consistently show is that the 2025 restructuring was truly global, even if the best-documented numbers come from the U.S. and Quebec.
Will AI Really Replace All Jobs? What the Data Actually Says
How 2025 Compares to the 2022–2023 Layoff Waves
To understand the scale of the 2025 cuts, it helps to compare them with Amazon’s earlier layoffs. Between late 2022 and early 2023, the company eliminated about 27,000 jobs worldwide, a response to the cooling of the e-commerce boom that had surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those cuts hit a broad mix of corporate, consumer, and operations roles, and were part of a wider tech-sector correction.
By contrast, the 2025 reduction of around 14,000 corporate roles is smaller in absolute terms but more tightly focused. Rather than responding to a collapse in demand, Amazon is targeting organizational complexity and rebalancing toward AI and automation initiatives. Taken together, the 2022–2023 and 2025 cycles still represent well over 40,000 jobs removed in just a few years, making this period one of the most intense restructuring phases in Amazon’s three-decade history.
At the same time, the company continues to hire aggressively in specific fields. AI research and engineering, data-center operations, robotics, and some frontline roles tied to new facilities are all seeing continued or even increased investment. For workers, this means the total Amazon headcount may not shrink as sharply as layoff headlines suggest, but the internal distribution of jobs is changing rapidly—and not everyone can or wants to move into the new growth areas.
Key Numbers From Amazon’s 2025 Layoffs
Based on official company statements, regulatory filings, and major news-outlet reporting, the most important confirmed figures for 2025 are:
- Global corporate cuts: Approximately 14,000 corporate jobs worldwide, equal to about 4% of Amazon’s corporate workforce, with most affected employees given around 90 days to seek internal transfers before separation.
- Previous reductions: Roughly 27,000 jobs eliminated across 2022–2023, meaning more than 40,000 Amazon positions cut over three years when the earlier waves are combined with 2025.
- U.S. WARN data: More than 4,700 confirmed job cuts in New York, California, New Jersey, and Washington, with nearly 40% of those roles in engineering, especially mid-level software development positions.
- Washington State: Around 2,300 corporate jobs slated for elimination, hitting Seattle, Bellevue, and other Washington hubs and raising concerns about the broader regional economy.
- California: Roughly 1,450 layoffs across the state, including hundreds of roles in Bay Area and Southern California offices tied to engineering, entertainment, and gaming.
- Quebec closures: All seven Amazon warehouses in Quebec scheduled for closure in early 2025, directly affecting about 1,700 permanent employees plus hundreds of temporary and contract workers.
- Amazon Games: “Significant role reductions” in the games division, with first-party AAA and MMO development scaled back, studios in Irvine and San Diego downsized, and more emphasis placed on Luna-focused and AI-powered titles.
These figures do not capture every single layoff at Amazon in 2025, but they represent the most reliable and widely reported data points available by the end of the year.
What It Means for Workers — and How to Respond
For Amazon employees and alumni, the 2025 restructuring underscores a few hard realities about today’s labor market. First, even high-performing engineers, managers, and specialists can be swept up in cost-cutting or strategic pivots when AI and automation are involved. Second, the best-documented cuts often occur in regions with strong transparency or labor-reporting rules, while workers elsewhere may face similar risks with less public visibility.
If you have been laid off—or worry that you might be—two immediate priorities usually stand out:
- Protect your future job search: Understand what potential employers can and cannot learn about your previous separation, and how to talk about layoffs honestly without undermining your candidacy. Our guide Can a Company Find Out If You Were Laid Off? explains how background checks, references, and disclosure actually work.
- Know your rights and options: In some regions and industries, workers are beginning to organize in response to AI-driven restructuring and warehouse closures. If you are exploring collective action or union support, see How to Form a Union Without Getting Fired for a plain-language overview of the legal protections and practical steps involved.
Beyond Amazon, the 2025 layoffs fit into a broader pattern: companies are using AI and automation both as a reason and as a mechanism to restructure their workforces. That does not mean every job at Amazon—or anywhere else—is disappearing, but it does mean the safest positions are increasingly those that combine technical literacy, adaptability, and the capacity to work alongside AI systems rather than compete directly with them.
A Global Company in Transition
Amazon’s 2025 layoffs are best understood not as a single event, but as a chapter in an ongoing transition. In North America, WARN filings and regional reporting lay out the concrete impacts on corporate hubs and warehouse networks. In Quebec, the closure of all warehouses marks a major clash between a global corporation and a province with strong labor protections. In specialized divisions like Amazon Games, strategic repositioning is reshaping the kinds of roles the company wants to fund.
Globally, the outlines are clear even when the exact numbers are not: Amazon is trying to become leaner, more AI-driven, and more centered on high-margin, cloud-and-data-heavy businesses. For workers, that means more volatility—but also, for those who can adapt, new opportunities in the very technologies driving the change.
As more state filings, union actions, and company statements emerge, this layoff tracker will continue to be a reference point for understanding how Amazon’s decisions ripple through local economies, career paths, and the larger debate about the future of work.
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