Amazon’s layoff of 14,000 workers last week marks yet another five-figure employee reduction in the tech workforce. The ecommerce and cloud services behemoth framed the move as streamlining corporate structure.
The layoffs also reflect broad overhiring trends across Big Tech.
“The core problem as I see it is the flood of VC capital drives big tech into a cycle: Overhire to ‘own’ the market, then lay off when bets don’t pay,” said Nico Westerdale, CTO at veterinary staffing company Indevets.
Other members of the 10,000+ layoffs club this year include Intel, Accenture, Microsoft, TCS and Panasonic.
Other members of the 10,000+ layoffs club this year include Intel, Accenture, Microsoft, TCS and Panasonic. More than 175,000 workers lost their jobs in 2025 across all tech companies tracked by job marketplace TrueUp.
For years, a CS degree or a coding bootcamp felt like a guarantee of job stability. People from diverse backgrounds pivoted into tech and landed life-changing six-figure salaries. 2021 saw the lowest number of tech layoffs in half a decade and a notable VC spike, while 2022 peaked at just under 478,000 job openings in April of that year, per TrueUp.
Economic headwinds have caused companies to pull back on expansion plans, and generative AI has taken off since then, too. Nearly every tech company seems interested in pivoting to get a piece of the adoption success they’ve seen from ChatGPT.
So the issue today is twofold: Companies overhired, and they’re gambling their money on AI as a moneymaker. Not necessarily a job replacer or efficiency booster.
“Stop trying to dominate every market by mass hiring where you don’t really need to,” Westerdale said.
Amazon’s corporate workforce cuts are aimed at “reducing bureaucracy, removing layers and shifting resources,” the company wrote in a blog post. For the tech giant, losing 14,000 people in corporate is less than 1% of its 1,556,000 workforce, viewed as slashing bloated teams of middle management and putting its stock price back on the rise. It’s a bet to pour more money into AI, too, the blog post said — a bubble that some analysts already predict is about to burst.
Behind these numbers are people and communities facing uncertainty.
For those former employees, there’s less stability, economic mobility and peace of mind. “Build fast and break things” works for corporations; they have the cash to burn on those bets. Workers don’t.
While companies like Amazon make rehiring promises, there are few places for laid-off workers to go. As we wrote about in Pittsburgh, there are still openings, but people are reporting trouble finding jobs at a time when companies are doubling down on specialization and refraining from upskilling entry-level employees.
Innovation moves fast in Big Tech, but when the bets go wrong, it’s workers who bear the risk.
