According to the report, these job cuts will affect the tech company’s devices wing, including its voice-assistant Alexa, along with the human resources division and retail.

Although the total number of jobs that will be cut has not been finalised, it would be roughly around 10,000, which would account for three percent of Amazon’s corporate employees and below one percent of its 1.5 million global workforce.

The company’s retrenchment plan comes ahead of the holiday shopping season, proving how fast the worsening global economic scenario pressured it to cut corners. More interestingly, the e-commerce giant had recently, citing “a particularly competitive labour market”, more than doubled the cap on the cash compensation for its tech employees.

Amazon, would, however, not be the only technology company to trim its workforce. Soon after his takeover of Twitter earlier this month, Elon Musk halved the social media firm’s head count.

Facebook parent Meta sacks over 11,000 employees

Meta Platforms Inc, the parent entity of social media platform Facebook, has sacked over 11,000 employees and is set to extend the freeze it has imposed on new hiring. This is 13 percent of the company’s workforce.

"I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted," Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said.

This is the first major round of layoffs at Meta, and is being considered as the most drastic one since Facebook began in 2004, reflecting a sharp slowdown in the digital advertising market due to the economic downturn.

Presently, it is unclear how these layoffs affect Meta's India business, and how many employees in the country are impacted. Meta has about 300-400 employees in India, people familiar with the matter told Moneycontrol.

Total income grew to Rs 2,324 crore for the financial year, posting a 56.5 percent jump from Rs 1,485.1 crore in the previous financial year. The gross advertising revenue saw a 74 percent on-year surge to Rs 16,189 crore during the period.

He attributed the decision to lay people off to a significant increase in investments that had been made due to the pandemic. “...the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too…,” he said, which turned out not to be the case.

“Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” he said.

Now, the CEO said the company has to become more capital efficient, and that it has shifted more resources to a “smaller number of high priority growth areas”. These are areas such as the AI discovery engine, ads and business platforms, and the metaverse.

Meta said it has cut costs by scaling back budgets, reducing perks, reducing real estate footprint and is restructuring teams as well.

“But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go,” Zuckerberg said.

Assistance to laid-off employees

He also outlined what will be given to affected employees as part of their severance. Support outside the US will be similar, he said, and there will be separate processes that take into account local employment laws.

Employees who are being laid off will get their base pay for 16 weeks of base pay with two additional weeks for every year at the company, all remaining PTO paid and health insurance for six months. The statement said that career support will be provided for three months with an external vendor, and immigration support for employees on visa.

Numerous Indians in the US work on an H-1B visa. Under H-1B visa regulations, workers get only a 60-day grace period, during which time they have to find new work to continue to stay in the country.

“I know this is especially difficult if you’re here on a visa. There’s a notice period before termination and some visa grace periods, which means everyone will have time to make plans and work through their immigration status. We have dedicated immigration specialists to help guide you based on what you and your family need,” the statement reads.

On Meta's future hiring, Zuckerberg said he is going to watch the business performance, operational efficiency, and other macroeconomic factors to "determine whether and how much we should resume hiring at that point".

Zuckerberg said they are also reining in costs by shrinking its real estate footprint and moving to a desk-sharing system for people who spend much of their time outside the office, and more cost-cutting measures will be taken in the coming months.