The last crisis at Amazon was especially visible as one of the top-level executives sent a duplicate copy of an email incomplete or sent out prematurely, thus notifying Amazon Web Services (AWS) staff of upcoming downsizing beforehand. An invitation to a meeting and a message of condolence sent by the Senior Vice President of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, Colleen Aubrey on Wednesday, January 27, 2026, was accidentally addressed to the whole organization.
The Interrupter and Short-term impact
This false email message had claimed that employees in the United States, Canada and Costa Rica already received formal messages of their terminations, causing an immediate crisis in the internal slack platform of the company.
Employees saw the meeting connection nearly vanish as quickly, but news spread very fast through the inside channels of communication and on Reddit.
One thing Aubrey commented in her letter was that such drastic changes are challenging to everyone involved. The situation was compounded by further silence on the part of Amazon on responding to comments.
Market Response and Stock Performance
The share price of AMZN climbed by 2.63%, to close U.S. trading on January 28 at 244.68, indicating that investors did not take much notice of the episode on a background of the further development trends of AWS.
The layoffs that represent fewer than 2% of overall headcount however indicate a more aggressive approach to cost containment.
Given that AWS revenue increased by 19% annually to above $100 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, the reductions will consider excess capacity that has been accrued in the hiring burst during the post-pandemic period.
Projected Future developments
The additional intelligent cuts can be expected during 2026 as AI is performing an increasing amount of jobs, and this may ultimately result in downsizing of the corporate workforce, should the hints of Beth Galetti come true.
Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, said in a blog post Wednesday that the company has been
Rreducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.
Amazon is working towards adopting leaner business practices to gain dominance in artificial general intelligence, but innovations may be hindered as a result of morale suppressions.
The investors are still optimistic that AMZN can come back, and they believe that by mid-year, the company may hit $300 per share because of the further dominance of the cloud.
