Why Amazon is laying off employees in India again?

Amazon has confirmed fresh job cuts in its Stores business, with fewer than 1,000 white-collar employees affected across India, the US and UK.

Amazon has reportedly carried out another round of job cuts affecting employees in India, the US and the UK, with fewer than 1,000 white-collar workers affected. The company confirmed that it had eliminated a “small number” of roles, primarily in its Stores business.

Amazon said the latest cuts are linked to changes in the structure of its Stores business, which oversees its main e-commerce website. (Representative Image)

The latest layoffs are part of a series of smaller workforce reductions that have followed Amazon’s larger round of about 30,000 job cuts that began last year and continued into January.

Why is Amazon laying off employees again?

Amazon said the latest cuts are linked to changes in the structure of its Stores business, which oversees its main e-commerce website, Reuters reported.

“We've adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities,” an Amazon spokesperson reportedly said. The company added that it had taken the “difficult decision” to eliminate a small number of roles.

The company has not disclosed how many employees in India have been affected.

According to Business Insider, internal Slack messages indicated that the latest cuts affected employees in customer service, marketplace support and engineering, including workers in India and the UK. Employees in the US, India and the UK were among those affected.

The latest reductions come as Amazon continues to streamline its corporate workforce after several major rounds of layoffs.

Amazon's earlier layoffs

Amazon's latest cuts follow several large-scale workforce reductions under CEO Andy Jassy.

In January 2023, Amazon eliminated more than 18,000 corporate roles globally, its largest layoff round at the time. The company later announced up to 14,000 job cuts in October 2025, followed by a round affecting as many as 16,000 corporate employees in January 2026.

A much larger round of about 30,000 corporate job cuts began last year and continued into January.

Amazon has also carried out targeted reductions in individual business units over the past few years.

Jassy has repeatedly spoken about reducing bureaucracy and management layers at Amazon. During the announcement of the 16,000 cuts in January, Amazon's senior vice president Beth Galetti said the company was working to “strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy”.

Jassy had also previously said that Amazon's expansion in workforce, business lines and footprint had resulted in more employees and management layers than the company needed.

Did AI cause Amazon's latest layoffs?

Artificial intelligence has been closely linked to Amazon's broader workforce strategy, but there is no indication that AI alone is the reason for this latest round of layoffs.

Amazon has been investing heavily in AI and has encouraged employees to use AI tools to improve productivity. The company is also preparing for significant spending on AI infrastructure, while reaching out to former employees for roles in AWS and its AI businesses, according to Mint's report citing Business Insider.

However, Amazon has previously pushed back on the idea that its layoffs are simply driven by AI.

An earlier HT analysis also noted that economists and affected workers have questioned whether AI is the direct reason behind the wave of layoffs across the technology industry. Cornell professor Karan Girotra said it was not clear whether companies were actually restructuring around AI-driven productivity gains, while noting that Amazon was still scaling back from the hiring surge during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Pandemic-era hiring also remains a factor

Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos has pointed to another reason for the company's continued workforce reductions: overhiring during the pandemic.

In a Fox News interview aired Wednesday, Bezos said Amazon had expanded its headcount significantly when people were staying home and ordering more goods during the pandemic.

“The whole team worked extremely hard and did so much, but we really grew our head count,” Bezos said when discussing the earlier 30,000 job cuts.

The latest India layoffs come as Amazon makes changes to its workforce and business structure. The company said it had adjusted parts of its Stores business to better align its structure with its priorities, while the latest cuts follow a larger restructuring that began last year.