Amazon.com (AMZN.US) confirmed on Wednesday that it has cut a small number of jobs, mainly within the Stores division responsible for its core e-commerce website, marking the latest modest round of workforce reductions since the large-scale layoffs that began last year and stretched into January, which eliminated roughly 30,000 positions.

A person with knowledge of the matter said the company trimmed fewer than 1,000 white-collar employees this time. An Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company adjusted part of the Stores business structure because it believes the new setup will better help it execute on its priorities.

According to reports, several units under the Stores division were affected, including customer service and seller partner services, and other parts of Amazon may also have been touched. Employees in the United States, India and the United Kingdom received notifications.

Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos said in an interview on Wednesday that continued layoffs are necessary because the company hired too aggressively during the pandemic. Asked about the 30,000 jobs lost in the previous round, he said that people were staying at home and kept ordering, adding that it was an incredible and stressful period for the company. He noted that the whole team worked very hard and accomplished a great deal, but headcount simply grew too quickly.

Amazon has carried out multiple rounds of layoffs since last year. In May 2025, the company confirmed about 100 positions were cut in its Devices & Services unit, which oversees products such as Kindle, Echo speakers, Alexa and Zoox self-driving vehicles. Amazon described the move at the time as a small fraction of the unit's total staff and part of a routine business review.

In July 2025, Amazon Web Services cut at least several hundred roles. Affected teams included AWS specialists, whose main job was helping customers develop products and promote AWS services. Amazon did not disclose a specific number, but people familiar with the matter said at least hundreds of employees were impacted. Notably, those cuts came shortly after CEO Andy Jassy warned that generative artificial intelligence could reduce some corporate roles, prompting the market to link Amazon's layoffs to AI automation and efforts to improve organizational efficiency.

In October 2025, Amazon launched a major layoff round. The company announced a broad overhaul of its corporate workforce, cutting about 14,000 corporate positions overall. Amazon said officially it wanted to reduce management layers, increase employee accountability, cut bureaucracy and redirect resources toward the most important businesses and customer needs. It also made clear at the time that it would continue hiring in some strategic priority areas in 2026, meaning the move was not a full hiring freeze but rather eliminating some roles while reallocating people elsewhere.

In January 2026, Amazon announced another roughly 16,000 positions would be eliminated. Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, said at the time that this continued earlier organizational adjustments. Some teams completed their reviews in October 2025, while others did not finish until January 2026, so the layoffs were implemented in stages.

By July 2026, Amazon also cut jobs in its AGI (artificial general intelligence) unit, though the company did not disclose the number. Amazon explained that it was further focusing on the projects that matter most to customers to speed up execution, and therefore had to eliminate some roles in the AGI organization.

Amazon's current layoffs cannot simply be interpreted as being driven by poor performance. In fact, its second-quarter results released in July showed total revenue rose 20% year over year to $200.6 billion, beating the average analyst estimate of $197 billion; operating income was $27.5 billion, up 43% year over year; net income reached $62.6 billion, up 245%, including $53.4 billion in pretax non-operating other income mainly from its investment in Anthropic; and diluted earnings per share were $5.75, far above the average analyst estimate of $1.82.

The core Amazon Web Services business saw revenue rise 37% year over year to $42.2 billion, above the average analyst estimate of $40.6 billion, marking its fastest growth since the fourth quarter of 2021. Jassy said AWS is thriving and pointed to strong momentum in its AI and custom chip businesses, both of which have annualized revenue exceeding $25 billion and are growing at triple-digit percentage rates year over year. Amazon also raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to $220 billion from a previously projected $200 billion.

As a result, the logic behind Amazon's current layoffs is closer to this: overhiring during the pandemic created a need to streamline the corporate organization, while AI-driven gains in per-capita productivity are pushing the company to reduce duplicate roles and redirect talent and capital toward strategic areas such as AI, cloud computing, chips and robotics.