Foreign News
Amazon Confirms 16,000 Job Cuts after Accidental Email
US technology giant Amazon has confirmed it will cut 16,000 jobs – hours after it told staff about a new round of global redundancies in an email apparently sent in error.
The email was sent late on Tuesday and refers to a swathe of employees in the US, Canada and Costa Rica having been laid off as part of an effort to “strengthen the company.
”The message was apparently shared by mistake, as it was quickly cancelled.
Early on Wednesday, Amazon announced job reductions as part of a plan to “remove bureaucracy” at the firm.
Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, said on Wednesday it was not planning to make “broad reductions every few months”, referring to Amazon’s announcement of 14,000 corporate job cuts in October.
“While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now,” she said.
Amazon employs around 1.5 million people globally, with around 350,000 in corporate roles.
Amazon has not said where the latest job losses will fall or which countries will be affected.
On Tuesday, a draft email written by Colleen Aubrey, a senior vice president at Amazon Web Services (AWS), was included in a calendar invitation sent by an executive assistant to a number of Amazon workers.
The title of the invitation was “Send project Dawn email,” an apparent reference to Amazon’s code name for the job cuts.
While the email made clear that the cuts were happening at Amazon, employees had not yet been officially informed.
“This is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers,” the email said.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success,” it added.
The job cuts had been expected by Amazon employees for weeks, according to a former employee who asked not be identified.
The broad understanding among employees had been that bosses intended to cut a total of around 30,000 roles, added the former employee, who left the company as part of the cuts in October.
The firm was expected to reach that number of job cuts with another major round of cuts this month, followed by further redundancies until the end of May.
While laid-off workers were invited to reapply for open positions at Amazon, the number of such roles was limited. People who did not move to another role received severance pay based on how long they had worked at the company.
Since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stood down as its chief executive four years ago, his successor Andy Jassy has led the company through several rounds of cuts.
Jassy has also attempted to bring a more strict work culture to the firm.
In-office work is now mandatory five-days a week, making Amazon one of the only major tech companies to require its employees to be in the office full-time.
Amazon is also focused on reducing costs, even monitoring corporate mobile phone use by AWS employees, according to a report in Business Insider, in an effort to limit a long-standing $50 per month reimbursement.
In an email Jassy sent to employees before the Thanksgiving holiday viewed by the BBC, the CEO said he was thankful for the “challenges at opportunities at work” as “the world is changing at a very rapid rate.”
Jassy called this era at Amazon “a time to rethink everything we’ve ever done.”
Earlier on Tuesday, the company announced it would close its roughly 70 remaining Amazon-branded grocery stores, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, and expand its Whole Foods Market business.
US President Donald Trump announced he will be seeking $1bn (£730m) in damages from Harvard University in his administration’s ongoing feud with the institution.
The news comes after the New York Times reported that the Trump administration had to backtrack from its demand for a $200m payment in negotiations with the university.
Trump cited the story in a Truth Social post late on Monday, blaming Harvard for “feeding a lot of nonsense” to the New York Times.
Trump officials have accused Harvard of not doing enough to tackle antisemitism during pro-Palestinian protests. Harvard has rejected the accusation.
Harvard has been a central target in the White House’s campaign to stamp out what it calls “woke” and “radical left” ideologies on American campuses.
In April last year, Trump revoked around $2bn in research grants to Harvard and froze federal funding.
The university sued the Trump administration over the move, saying no government “should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”.
A US federal court later overturned the billions in funding cuts, ruling the government had violated university’s free speech rights.
The White House vowed to immediately challenge the “egregious decision”, saying Harvard remains “ineligible for grants in the future”.
Before Monday’s announcement, the government had been in discussions with Harvard over a potential deal to unfreeze federal funding.
“We are now seeking One Billion Dollars in damages, and want nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University,” Trump wrote on Monday.
He accused Harvard of “serious and heinous illegalities”, but did not clarify how he believed it had broken the law.
Trump has previously threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status and take control of the university’s patents stemming from federally funded research.
Three other Ivy League universities, Columbia, Penn and Brown, struck deals with Trump to preserve funding that was at risk due to similar claims by the administration, rather than go to court.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Prime Minister, said on Tuesday at the World Government Summit in Dubai that access to social media for minors under 16 would be banned.
Sanchez added that all platforms will be required to implement age verification systems.
“Our children are exposed to a space they were never meant to navigate alone.
“We will no longer accept that.
We will protect them from the digital Wild West. ”He added that his government would also introduce a new bill next week to hold social media executives accountable for illegal and hateful content.
Australia in December became the first country to ban social media for children under 16.
It’s a move being closely watched by other countries considering similar age-based measures, such as Britain and France.
U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to sue Grammys host, Trevor Noah after a joke he made about disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein on stage.
Trump blasted the comedian as a “total loser,” adding: “It looks like I’ll be sending my lawyers to sue this poor, pathetic, talentless, dope of an M.
C., and suing him for plenty of dollars. ”Trump criticised Noah’s joke, made after the song of the year gong was handed out at the ceremony on Sunday night.
Writing on Truth Social, in a post strewn with uppercase words, Trump said: “Noah said, INCORRECTLY about me, that Donald Trump and Bill Clinton spent time on Epstein Island. WRONG!!!
“I can’t speak for Bill, but I have never been to Epstein Island, nor anywhere close, and until tonight’s false and defamatory statement, have never been accused of being there, not even by the Fake News Media.
“Noah, a total loser, better get his facts straight, and get them straight fast.”
He added: “Get ready Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you!”
Trump also blasted the ceremony saying: “The Grammy Awards are the WORST, virtually unwatchable! CBS is lucky not to have this garbage litter their airwaves any longer.”
This was an apparent reference to Disney taking over the broadcast rights for the award ceremony starting in 2027.
He has also engaged in legal action with the New York Times, Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal.
Last July, U.S. media giant Paramount, which owns CBS, agreed to pay Trump 16 million dollars to settle a lawsuit over a 2024 CBS interview with Kamala Harris, the former vice-president and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee.
Noah, 41, is a South African-born comedian and TV personality who hosted “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central in the U.S. for seven years.
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