From Amazon to Ama-gone: Bezos swings the axe on hundreds at HQ

Amazon has confirmed a round of job cuts are taking place at its headquarters in Seattle, USA.

The internet monster on Monday said it was cutting roles, although hopes to reassign sacked people to different positions where possible.

"As part of our annual planning process, we are making headcount adjustments across the company – small reductions in a couple of places and aggressive hiring in many others," a spokesperson for the Jeff Bezos-led operation told The Reg on Monday.

"For affected employees, we work to find roles in the areas where we are hiring."

While Amazon did not put a number on the redundancies, the Seattle Times reports the cuts in that city number "several hundred" and that hundreds more jobs will be shed elsewhere.

Amazon employs about 40,000 people in Seattle, and 560,000 worldwide. The biz said it expects to hire more people in the Evergreen State city for other roles.

Still, word of the cuts comes at a particularly inopportune time for Amazon as the online bazaar is trying to lure US cities into offering billions in infrastructure investments and tax breaks so one can be chosen as the home of its new HQ2 campus.

Amazon has promised that HQ2 will bring thousands of new jobs to the host city. Those competing municipalities will not be particularly impressed with the news that Amazon is eliminating jobs.

While Amazon reaps huge revenues ($61bn last quarter), some areas of the business perform far better than others. Amazon's retail operation managed to make a profit of less than $775m last quarter on $55.3bn revenues, while the AWS cloud business was able to turn a $1.35bn net income from $5.11bn in revenues.

Amazon has also been aggressive in expanding its ranks of late, adding new workers in rapidly growing areas like the Alexa virtual assistant platform and its foray into brick-and-mortar retail with the acquisition of grocery chain Whole Foods. ®