Amazon Seeks to Hire Recently Laid-Off Meta Workers as Xbox Prepares Another Round of Cuts
Amazon’s cloud division, AWS, has proactively reached out to recently laid-off Meta employees and encouraged its workers to recruit them actively. AWS marketing chief Julia White told employees in an internal meeting late last month that the team was short-staffed and had about 160 open positions. “We have jobs and we need top talent here,” White said, describing hiring as a bigger challenge than retention and placing it at the top of the priority list. She said turnover in the unit was higher than she would like.
The effort comes amid Meta’s massive layoff wave, in which the company cut about 8,000 jobs last month while making heavy investments in artificial intelligence. Public filings reviewed showed that in California and Washington alone, 4,665 employees were laid off. Managers were hit hardest of all, with more than 1,400 management roles cut, and nearly half of them were software engineering managers. Individual software engineers were the second-largest group affected, with about 1,000 layoffs, while data scientists absorbed 419 cuts and product managers 301. Fewer than 100 marketing workers and fewer than 50 sales employees were included in the layoffs.
Meta is reorganizing its teams around small AI-focused “pods” and internally refers to some employees as “AI builders.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously linked the cuts to the need to offset AI expenses, not to automation itself.
The picture at Amazon itself is more complex. The company eliminated more than 30,000 positions in rounds of cuts over the past year, while simultaneously hiring aggressively in strategic units such as AWS. Management has described the cuts as part of a restructuring aimed at reducing hierarchy and bureaucracy and improving cooperation and speed, while continuing to invest in the areas expected to drive the company’s future. In AWS’s marketing unit, the internal changes include a shift from a highly “siloed” model to a more collaborative one designed to reduce handoffs and increase efficiency. White noted that in exit interviews, employees raise not only compensation questions but also lifestyle factors and career growth. The team is working to ensure workers feel fairly rewarded in a market where demand for skilled employees remains high. Amazon emphasized that restructuring does not prevent targeted hiring, and that the company remains committed to identifying outstanding talent in areas it sees as critical to its future.
Microsoft gaming division Xbox is planning significant layoffs in July, immediately after the company’s fiscal year ends in June. This is the first major organizational move under the new CEO, Asha Sharma, who took over the unit in February. The layoffs follow an internal review that revealed a difficult financial picture, Xbox’s operating margin fell to just 3 percent, while spending on content, platforms and hardware subsidies exceeded $20 billion, even as annual revenue fell by nearly $500 million. “Management concluded that the current structure is not built for the road ahead,” the company said.
The expected cuts will focus on reducing marketing expenses and other departments, while leadership reviews the division’s strategic priorities and budget allocations. Executives are preparing a review of the product portfolio and platform infrastructure, taking into account the decline in console popularity, a drop driven in part by price increases. Those increases were affected by rising memory chip costs, fueled by soaring demand for AI. Sharma herself made the direction clear in an internal memo cited in reports: “The current pace of investment in content and platform is no longer sustainable.” She said a broad reassessment is needed, financial models must be reset, and the focus narrowed to the highest-value initiatives.
In April, Sharma moved to adjust the subscription economy by announcing a price cut for Game Pass, a change that coincided with the removal of exclusive early access to new Call of Duty releases from the subscription, a step intended to align the offering with near-term profitability goals. The current move comes after an already difficult period for gaming operations. A year ago, Microsoft cut thousands of jobs in the division, shut down The Initiative studio, halted development on the reboot of Perfect Dark, and stopped production of Everwild. Despite the grim atmosphere, Xbox issued an official statement confirming continued development of The Elder Scrolls VI, stressing that the renewed investment model is intended to protect core franchises and preserve critical platform capabilities over the long term.
