April 20, 2023: On Tuesday, the firm confirmed that Amazon started removing a few employees in its advertising firms as part of CEO Andy Jassy’s effort to rein in costs.

The copy of the memo shared by an Amazon spokesperson, Paul Kotas, Amazon’s senior vice president of advertising, IMDb and Grand Challenge, I sent a note informing staffers of the job cuts.

“As Andy shared for weeks, throughout the 2023 planning process, we’ve been scrupulously prioritizing resources to maximize benefits to customers and the long-term health of our business,” Kotas wrote. “For Ads, this process involves reallocating resources by shifting team employees, slowing down or blocking certain programs, or concluding we did not have the right skills to address our priorities. As a result, we have made deeply-considered outcomes about how best to move forward, resulting in role eliminations for a small percentage of the organization.”

According to two affected employees, the company notified workers they were being let go through email Tuesday morning. These people requested anonymity as they weren’t authorized to speak.

In an email to affected workers, Amazon said the layoffs would begin June 20 or July 17 if is affecting workers living in New York and New Jersey, following a 60- to 90-day transition period, in which they can search for another role inside the company.

How many people are being let go all over the advertising unit is still being determined. Jassy announced Amazon would lay off 9,000 employees last month, on top of the 18,000 cuts already announced last November and January. The earlier layoffs focused on retail, devices, recruiting and human resources groups.

In March, Jassy stated that the latest level would affect employees in Amazon’s ads, cloud computing, Twitch live streaming and human resources divisions. Earlier this month, roughly 100 employees were laid off in Amazon’s video games business.

Amazon is undergoing the most extensive layoffs in its 29-year past after it reached on a hiring spree during the Covid pandemic. The company’s global workforce will swell to over 1.6 million by 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Jassy is taking on a broad overview of the firm’s expenses as it reckons with an economic downturn and a slowing increase in its core retail business. Amazon froze recruiting in its corporate workforce, axed some experimental projects, and slowed warehouse expansion.

By announcing advertisement and Amazon Web Services layoffs, Jassy shows that two of Amazon’s significant and most profitable businesses resist cost-cutting.