Amazon on Tuesday appeared to have prematurely alerted Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees to layoffs planned for Wednesday morning by sending a commiseration email and team-wide meeting invitation 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 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."
"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.
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Yikes. This is a nightmare. But just another day in the massive world of Amazon.