Why it matters: Seattle is Amazon's hometown, and repeated rounds of layoffs hit here harder than raw job numbers suggest.
Beyond the immediate economic ripple effects — from downtown offices to small businesses that rely on Amazon workers — the cuts deepen uncertainty in a city facing 5% unemployment and sap morale where the company has long been an anchor employer.
Driving the news: The cuts are part of a broader effort to streamline, senior vice president Beth Galetti wrote in a blog post yesterday.
"As I shared in October, we've been working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy. While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now," she wrote in the memo.
Flashback: During the October layoffs, Amazon trimmed about 2,300 Seattle-area jobs — including hundreds at its South Lake Union and Bellevue offices.
Software development roles were hardest hit, with more than 600 positions cut statewide, per a notice detailing the layoffs.
Yesterday's layoffs together with October's cuts rank among Amazon's largest workforce reductions. The company previously cut about 27,000 jobs in two waves between late 2022 and early 2023.
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