Not So Thoughtful

[The blog post not yet being live might’ve been a hint.]
On Wednesday, Amazon announced they’d be laying off about 16,000 workers. That’s not great. Also bad? They sent employees an email a day prior which accidentally spilled the beans prematurely.

The email sent on Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS, wrongly said that impacted employees in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs. In Slack messages viewed by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said the Wednesday meeting was almost immediately canceled. Amazon referred in the email to the layoffs as “Project Dawn.”

I’m sure that was a fun 24 hours for everyone at Amazon.

“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.”

The decisions may have been made thoughtfully, but the announcement sure wasn’t.

Link: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-bungles-wednesday-layoff-plan-with-misfired-internal-email-2026-01-28/