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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 by 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
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.
The job hunt
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.
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