Amazon mistakenly sent an internal email that appeared to alert some Amazon Web Services employees about planned layoffs hours before the company expected to deliver official job-loss notifications.
The email, sent on Jan. 27 and tied to layoffs planned for the morning of Jan. 28, sparked confusion after a related meeting invite was quickly canceled, according to reporting that reviewed internal messages and employee discussions.
The message was signed by Colleen Aubrey, a senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS, and it incorrectly suggested that affected employees had already been told they were losing their jobs.
The email referred to the layoffs as “Project Dawn,” and AWS employees who received it discussed the situation in Slack channels viewed by Reuters, according to the report.
What the email said
In the misfired email, Aubrey wrote that impacted employees in the United States, Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs, even though Amazon had not yet notified affected employees at that time, according to the report.
The email included a team-wide meeting invitation connected to the layoffs, but employees said that invite was almost immediately canceled.
The email included language meant to address the emotional impact of workforce changes.
“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Aubrey wrote, according to the email reviewed by Reuters.
Layoffs planned for Jan. 28
The reporting said Amazon appeared to have mistakenly alerted many AWS cloud computing employees about layoffs planned for the morning of Jan. 28, after the commiseration email and meeting invite went out hours too early.
Reuters had reported on Jan. 23 that Amazon intended to lay off thousands of corporate employees starting this week, but the company had not yet informed impacted employees and had not confirmed the plan, according to the report.
People familiar with the matter told Reuters that jobs across Amazon units covering AWS, retail, Prime Video and human resources were slated to be affected, though the full scope of the week’s layoffs was unclear.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, according to the report.
Broader job-cut context
The misfired email landed during a larger corporate headcount reduction that prior reporting said could involve thousands of jobs in the current cycle.
The Trak.in report described the layoffs as part of a multi-phased reduction that could ultimately eliminate around 30,000 corporate positions globally.
Reuters reporting cited by The Straits Times said Amazon laid off about 14,000 people in October as part of a broader plan to reduce corporate staff by around 30,000.
That same Reuters reporting said Amazon tied the October job cuts to increased use of artificial intelligence and efforts to reduce layers of bureaucracy.
Reuters reporting cited by The Straits Times also said the full 30,000 jobs would represent a small portion of Amazon’s 1.58 million employees, but nearly 10% of the firm’s corporate workforce.
Separately, the report said Amazon cut jobs on Jan. 27 in its Fresh grocery and Go market divisions as it plans to close existing brick-and-mortar stores and convert some of them to Whole Foods stores.
What remains unclear
It was not clear how many jobs would be cut in this round or how soon formal notices would be issued, according to Trak.in’s account of the situation.
The sources also said Amazon had not publicly confirmed the layoff details or the misfired email, even as employees grappled with uncertainty after the early message circulated.
The incident highlights how sensitive internal communication can be during large workforce changes, especially when multiple regions and divisions are involved.
For employees, the premature message added confusion at a time when official details were still limited and the scope of the layoffs remained unclear.
