The tech sector in the United States is sinking a little deeper into the crisis.

The e-commerce giant Amazon announced on Wednesday evening that it was going to cut "just over 18,000 jobs", including in Europe.

In a message on the group's website, CEO Andy Jassy said that Amazon, which had already announced some 10,000 job cuts in November, revised its estimate upwards.

The manager, who specifies that he decided to announce "this news quickly" because it was "leaked" by an employee, mentions that the employees affected "or their representatives, if necessary, in Europe" will be contacted by the company on January 18.

Massive hiring during the pandemic

“Reviewing our annual planning (….) has been more challenging this year given the economic uncertainty and the fact that we have been hiring heavily over the past few years,” Amazon says.

The group has indeed recruited with a vengeance during the Covid-19 pandemic to meet the explosion in demand, thus doubling its global staff between the beginning of 2020 and the beginning of 2022. It had 1.54 million employees at the end of September. worldwide, not including seasonal workers.

This job cut plan is above all the most important among the recent announcements of workforce reductions affecting the technology sector in the United States.

It is also the most massive staff reduction in the Seattle company's history.

It must be said that Amazon saw its net profit drop by 9% year on year in the third quarter.

And for the last quarter, the company anticipated anemic growth in November by its standards, between 2% and 8% over one year, and an operating profit of between 0 and 4 billion dollars, against 3.5 for the same period of 2021. The group is due to announce its annual results on February 1.

The same trend at Meta, Twitter and Snapchat

In the tech sector, large platforms with an advertising-based business model are facing advertiser budget cuts due to inflation and rising interest rates.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced in November the loss of 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of its workforce.

At the end of August, Snapchat cut around 20% of its workforce, or more than 1,200 employees.

Twitter, bought by Elon Musk, for its part fired about half of its 7,500 employees.

The latest, the IT group Salesforce, specializing in management solutions and in the cloud, announced on Wednesday that it was laying off around 10% of its employees, or just under 8,000 jobs.

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