Amazon bungles Wednesday layoff plan with misfired internal email

By Greg Bensinger

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Amazon on Tuesday appeared to have mistakenly ​ed many Amazon Web Services cloud ‌computing employees about layoffs planned for Wednesday morning with a ‌commiseration email and team-wide meeting invite sent hours early.

Reuters reported on Friday that Amazon intended to lay off thousands of corporate employees starting ⁠this week, but ‌the company has not yet informed impacted employees, nor has it confirmed ‍the layoff plan.

The email sent on Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions ​at AWS, wrongly says that impacted employees ‌in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs.

In Slack channels viewed by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said the meeting invite for ⁠Wednesday was almost immediately ​canceled. Amazon referred in the ​email to the layoffs as "Project Dawn."

"Changes like this are hard on everyone," Aubrey ‍wrote in ⁠the email, reviewed by Reuters. "These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we ⁠position our organization and AWS for future success."

Amazon did ‌not immediately respond to a request for ‌comment.

(Reporting by Greg Bensinger)