Amazon's layoffs reach 27,000 with latest job cut announcement

March 20 (UPI) -- Already announcing a headcount reduction of some 18,000 jobs this year, online retail giant Amazon said Monday it was trimming another 9,000 from its payrolls, citing an uncertain economic future.

CEO Andy Jassy said in an open letter to employees that jobs would be eliminated over the next few weeks, mostly in advertising, its gaming service Twitch, cloud computing unit AWS and part of its human resources division.

"This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term," he said.

Over the past years, Jassy said that Amazon needed strong hires to support its various business expansions. But the uncertainty over the direction of the global economy warranted tough choices on headcounts and overall costs.

"The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers' lives and Amazon as a whole," he said.

This is the second major announcement on payrolls so far this year, which reflects problems not only for Amazon, but the broader tech sector.

Facebook parent Meta was the first of the tech giants to downsize when it let 11,000 staff go in November. That was followed by layoffs elsewhere in the tech sector, from Microsoft to Google, the latter which made plans to trim staff by 12,000.

Sundar Pichai, the CEO at Google's parent company Alphabet, at the time blamed the "different economic reality" that exists for tech companies today over the past two years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amazon announced plans in January to trim 18,000 positions from its payroll, an announcement that came the same day that cloud-based software firm Salesforce shed 7,000 jobs.

Amazon last year enacted a hiring freeze for corporate jobs and later said it would delay construction of a major corporate headquarters slated for Arlington, Va., as part of a cost-cutting move.

Amazon (AMZN) was down 2.5% to trade at $96.52 per share. The tech-heavy NASDAQ was down just 0.22% as of 12:30 p.m. EDT.