Burnout, frustration and heartbreak: Amazon layoffs take their toll in saturated job market

On an early morning in January, Jake Linsley woke up to a text from Amazon that was lighting up his phone.

"I thought it was saying, 'Your package is delayed,'" Linsley said in an interview. "I read it again and was like, 'Holy s---, I got fired.'"

Linsley, who worked as a finance manager at Amazon for nearly six years, was one of roughly 16,000 employees swept up in the company's mass layoffs in late January. Combined with the more than 14,000 staffers let go three months earlier, it marked the steepest cuts in Amazon's history.

As an Amazon employee, Linsley was part of an American corporate elite: working for a tech giant with opportunities for growth, promotion, high salaries and enviable perks. But he and the other laid-off workers suddenly entered the harsh reality of a job market being rapidly reshaped by artificial intelligence — and competing with hordes of others who had been let go b Meta, Salesforce and Cisco. In some cases, the jobs they'd been hired to do simply don't exist anymore. And the tech giants continue to cut roles in part to fund the hundreds of billions of dollars they're investing in AI.

The tech sector has laid off roughly 140,000 employees in the U.S. so far this year, more than any other industry, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. In May, layoffs across the industry reached their highest for any month since August 2024, before easing in June.

AI was the main reason companies gave for the cuts for a fourth straight month, Challenger said in a report last week. The firm said AI has been cited in about 23% of all job cut announcements in 2026.

"Tech remains the epicenter of this year's cuts," Challenger said. "AI is the dominant force as companies are restructuring around it, automating roles and reallocating budgets toward new capabilities. The sector is being reshaped in real time."

Amazon has been downsizing more aggressively than many of its peers, laying off more than 57,000 staffers since 2022, or roughly 16% of its corporate workforce. According to data from the website Layoffs.fyi, Amazon has accounted for about 13% of the tech industry's cuts this year.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has warned employees that AI "should change the way our work is done," and that in the next few years, efficiency gains from the technology "will reduce our total corporate workforce." The company has looked for ways to unwind its pandemic-era hiring binge and eliminate bureaucracy so that it can operate like "the world's largest startup."

CNBC spoke to more than a dozen people laid off by Amazon over the past eight-plus months about how they've navigated the job market at a time of swelling industry unemployment and, for many, a sense of diminishing opportunity.

While some have since landed roles at places like Apple or Salesforce, others are staring at hundreds of unanswered job applications and roles with pay cuts. Some described the dark irony of going all in on AI at Amazon only to find themselves replaced by it.

Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement that the cuts were made to ensure the company can move fast and serve customers. Amazon continues to hire and invest in strategic areas that are critical to its future, she added.

"We don't make decisions to eliminate roles lightly, and we work hard to support employees who are impacted," MacLachlan said.

AI wasn't the reason for the vast majority of the layoffs, Amazon said.

Linsley's job search lasted for about three months, before he took a position in April as a vice president at a health-care IT startup.

"I'd rather have a stable job than one that can grow 5x and disappear overnight," he said.

Courtney Haeflinger applied to hundreds of jobs but struggled to land interviews.

For months after she was laid off from Amazon Web Services in January, she'd begin her day in front of her computer at 8:30 a.m., diligently scanning job boards and refreshing her inbox, hoping to hear back from recruiters.

As soon as a job was posted, there would quickly be 200 to 300 applicants, Haeflinger said. She couldn't tell if it was due to the raft of unemployed workers, or if bots were running wild.

"It makes it harder for us as real job seekers to get in the door," said Haeflinger, 49, who landed a job last week at AT&T. "It's frustrating."

In the months after her departure from Amazon, the pace of cuts across the industry turned a difficult task into a seeming impossibility.

Haeflinger applied for a few jobs at Meta, around the time the company was announcing plans to eliminate 10% of its staff. A job at Oracle came across her feed. But when she saw the software vendor was cutting thousands of jobs, she hesitated to apply. 

Amazon, meanwhile, has continued to downsize through smaller rounds, slashing roles in customer service in April, followed by cuts in the third-party seller support division in May, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the layoffs weren't made public.

The company laid off 57 employees in its home state of Washington between May and early June, according to a WARN filing released Monday. The filing doesn't indicate what units were impacted, but software engineers, program managers and product roles were among the job titles listed.

Dorian Smith was only out of work for about a month after getting laid off by Amazon in January, but he said it was a humbling experience that drove him to take a job at a late-stage startup.

Smith said he'd thought of Amazon as a "lifelong career," having worked his way up in customer service to a job as a web development engineer over his 10-plus years at the company.

"It was almost heartbreaking in a way because my identity felt tied to that job," Smith said.  

He applied to at least 250 jobs and only heard back from four companies, all with "generic rejection emails," Smith said. He ultimately connected with a recruiter after posting on LinkedIn, which led him to the startup world.

"I always had this thought of, 'I have Amazon on my resume, this prestigious thing,'" Smith said. "But when this layoff happened, it was like, 'OK, big deal, so do 30,000 other people.'"

For some former Amazon workers, the layoffs provided an opportunity to reset.

Yogesh Verma, a former AWS engineer who lost his job in January, called it a "blessing in disguise." The 25-year-old said he soured on Amazon as it enacted a strict return-to-office policy, pressure around AI usage grew and employees were tasked with "building new products haphazardly." 

"Initially, it felt like, 'Oh, what am I going to do now,' but it gradually turned out for the better," Verma said. "The workload was getting higher and higher, and the work-life balance was also getting worse."

In April, Verma took a slight pay cut to join an AI marketing company that he said offers a "good environment," hybrid work options and an opportunity to learn new skills. 

A former director in Amazon's advertising unit who was laid off in October — and who wished to remain anonymous in order to not jeopardize his job search — said working for a big tech company was a "life changer," but that the job had become a drain on his mental and physical health.

He said he's taking time off to strengthen his AI coding skills, so that when he reenters the job market, he's better equipped for "software development in this new era."

Chris DeSantis, who worked as a senior product manager for nearly four years, said he's "happy to take less money" if it means he can work for a company that's closer to the cutting edge of AI. DeSantis, 32, was laid off from Amazon's retail organization in January. 

"When you look at these companies and what they're doing with AI, people like us, engineers and technical product managers, we want to be doing the fun stuff, building things super fast," DeSantis said. "It used to be that going to the bigger companies was that, but now, at least based on the organization I was in, we weren't close to doing the fun stuff."  

Whether it's fun or not, AI has taken over the halls of Amazon.

Jassy, who replaced founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021, has urged employees to "use and experiment with AI whenever you can," and figure out ways to "get more done with scrappier teams." 

AWS has released a slew of AI tools mostly targeted for enterprises, while also striving to develop more competitive AI models and putting Amazon at the center of the surge in demand for AI compute. The company has infused AI across more surfaces of its e-commerce website, including the search bar, and has revamped its aging Alexa digital assistant with more conversational and agentic features. 

While the AI blitz is viewed as essential to keep Amazon relevant in the next era of technology, life at the company now resembles a "rat race," in the words of a current software engineer, who asked not to be named in order to speak candidly on the subject.

Some Amazon managers track employees' AI activity via internal dashboards, and are instructed by leaders to remind their teams to adopt the tools as much as possible, with certain teams factoring usage into performance reviews, three current and former employees said. 

A former AWS engineer who was laid off in January and also asked to remain unnamed said it had become "abundantly clear that the priority was AI everywhere, regardless of whether it really helped or made sense."

At the same time, Amazon and other companies are reckoning with the high costs of AI and have taken steps to rein in so-called tokenmaxxing, where developers use AI as much as possible with little regard to output.

Another former engineer at AWS said Amazon added badges to its internal "phone tool" directory that scored employees' usage of its AI apps called Q, based on the number of tokens they consumed.

In late May, Amazon shut down a similar phone tool leaderboard, called Kirorank, after it discovered employees were tokenmaxxing to climb up the ranks.

As it slashes its corporate workforce, Amazon has ramped up its hiring in lower-cost countries like India, according to three former employees who described that dynamic in the organizations where they worked. One of those people — a former manager who was laid off in May — called it a "no-brainer," as the company knows that, compared to Seattle, it can hire people in India at a "fraction of the cost."

DeSantis, the laid-off product manager, said he adopted a "survivalist mentality" after making it through six rounds of job cuts during his time at Amazon. When his time finally came, DeSantis said he did his best not to take it personally.

"It really is kind of bizarre when it does happen to you," DeSantis said. "When you look back, it's like there's nothing you could've done."

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