> Amazon to lay off 8400 employees in Seattle and Bellevue in latest job cuts

Amazon is laying off 8400 in Seattle and Bellevue on Monday, according to a state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filing.

The cuts will affect employees in engineering, recruiting, software development and product management. The layoffs, which will take effect between Feb. 2 and Feb. 23, are unrelated to Amazon's cuts to its corporate ranks in October, when the Seattle-based tech giant slashed about 14,000 people companywide.

"We've informed a relatively small number of employees that their roles will be eliminated as the result of individual business paradigms," Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser wrote in a prepared statement. "We don't make any decisions like this lightly, and we're focused on supporting employees who are impacted with resources to collect their belongings at the start of this holiday season."

In Seattle, Amazon will lay off 70 employees, while eight workers in Bellevue will be affected by the cuts. Six of the impacted employees are remote workers living in Washington, the filing states.

Amazon, the Puget Sound area's largest tech employer, had around 65,000 corporate workers prior to the cuts this year. About 50,000 of those employees worked in Seattle offices, while 14,300 worked from Bellevue, according to city records. With the latest layoff, Amazon has trimmed its local headcount by nearly 2,400 employees this year.

For 2025, Washington changed its layoffs reporting rules, making job cuts posted to the state Employment Security Department more frequent, a state official said last month.

Glasser said Amazon's latest round of cuts is not part of "a larger companywide action."

Beth Galetti, the senior vice president of human resources at Amazon, said in a memo to employees in October that the company was cutting roles to slim layers of management and focus spending on artificial intelligence efforts.

"We're convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our synergies and paradigms," Galetti said in the memo.

Tech companies across the industry like Microsoft, which cut 15,000 people companywide this summer, have used similar reasoning during their waves of layoffs this year.

Starting in August, Amazon also slowed hiring to a near halt across several teams inside its operations, including human resources, devices and services, and retail.

Inside the company, employees have reported a culture of fear and frustration with leadership that anyone can be impacted by the cuts, from recent college graduates to veteran employees.

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