On an early morning in January, Jake Linsley woke up to a text from Amazon lighting up his phone.
"I thought it was saying, 'Your package is delayed,'" Linsley said. "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, according to CNBC. Combined with more than 14,000 staffers let go three months earlier, it marked the steepest cuts in Amazon's history. Amazon has now laid off more than 57,000 corporate employees since 2022, roughly 16% of its corporate workforce.
The workers who lost their jobs did not simply step into a waiting labor market. They entered what MarketWatch described as an era of low hiring, one where Americans report day-to-day dread about their job prospects despite an unemployment rate that remains historically low. Linsley and others from Amazon found themselves competing with waves of laid-off workers from Meta, Salesforce, and Cisco. In some cases, the jobs they had been hired to do no longer exist.
The tech sector has laid off roughly 140,000 employees in the United States so far this year, more than any other industry, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. In May, layoffs across the industry reached their highest level for any single month since August 2024, before easing somewhat in June. Artificial intelligence was the main reason companies gave for the cuts for a fourth straight month. Challenger 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 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 surge and eliminate bureaucracy so that it can operate like "the world's largest startup."
According to data from the website Layoffs.fyi, Amazon has accounted for about 13% of the tech industry's cuts this year. CNBC spoke to more than a dozen people laid off by Amazon over the past eight-plus months. While some have landed roles at places like Apple or Salesforce, others are staring at hundreds of unanswered job applications and roles that come with pay cuts. Some described the dark irony of going all in on AI at Amazon only to find themselves replaced by it.
The situation reflects a broader tension in the labor market. The official unemployment rate remains low, but that number does not capture the difficulty workers face in finding new positions comparable to what they left. For many displaced tech employees, the search has stretched from weeks into months.
Linsley's story, while dramatic in its early-morning delivery, is not unusual. Thousands of workers across the industry are navigating the same uncertainty, sending out applications, waiting for responses that often do not come, and adjusting expectations about salary and role. The companies cutting those jobs, meanwhile, continue to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure.
