Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.Com Inc., speaks during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon on Tuesday began laying off employees in its corporate and tech workforce as CEO Andy Jassy steps up efforts to rein in costs.
The company notified workers in several divisions, including Alexa and the Luna cloud gaming unit, that they were being let go, according to LinkedIn posts from Amazon employees who said they had been impacted.
Amazon is aiming to eliminate about 10,000 jobs, mostly in retail, devices and human resources, The New York Times reported Monday. The number remains fluid because the cuts are being implemented by individual teams, according to the Times.
By midday Tuesday, Amazon had not sent out any companywide communication about the planned layoffs, which sparked frustration among employees, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because of confidentiality.
Representatives from Amazon declined to comment.
In recent weeks, Amazon also began laying off some contracted employees who worked in recruiting roles for its advertising, internal operations, and Fire TV divisions, according to people with knowledge of the cuts.
One employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said Amazon informed her earlier this month that it wouldn’t be renewing her contract. Last month, she was in talks to pursue a full-time role in Amazon’s consumer division, but her interview was abruptly canceled due to ongoing restructuring, she was told.
The Amazon Spheres, part of the Amazon headquarters campus, right, in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Sunday, Oct. 24, 2021.
Chona Kasinger | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Jassy has aggressively curtailed expenses across the company in recent months as it stares down a weakening economy and slowing growth in its retail business. Previously, the company said it would pause hiring among its corporate workforce, and it has halted some experimental projects, as well as opted to close, delay or cancel new warehouse locations.
Until now, it had managed to avoid mass layoffs by offering employees impacted by project closures the opportunity to transfer to other divisions within the company.
The job cuts represent a stark reversal for Amazon, which less than a year ago couldn’t find enough workers to keep its warehouses staffed in a hot labor market and was still in the midst of a pandemic-fueled hiring spree. It nearly doubled its workforce between the end of 2019 and the end of 2021 from 798,000 employees globally to 1.6 million.
Since then, it has moved to slow headcount growth as consumers have returned to physical stores, and its retail business is no longer growing at a rapid clip as it has in recent years. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky last month said the company is seeing signs consumers are feeling the sting of inflation.
“We are preparing for what could be a slower growth period,” Olsavsky said on a call with reporters following the company’s third-quarter earnings results, which included weaker-than-expected guidance for the current period.
The company still plans to bring on 150,000 employees for the holiday shopping period, the same number of workers it said it would add last year.
Job cuts are hitting the tech sector hard after years of unbridled growth. Facebook parent Meta last week laid off 13% of its staff, while Twitter, Shopify, Salesforce and Stripe have also announced cuts.
The expected layoffs would represent the biggest cut in the company’s 28-year history. In 2001, Amazon slashed 1,300 jobs, or 15% of its workforce, after the dot-com bubble burst.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is on the launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites, which are expected to eventually rival Elon Musk’s Starlink system, at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 9, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
Amazon on Monday launched the first batch of its Kuiper internet satellites into space after an earlier attempt was scrubbed due to inclement weather.
A United Launch Alliance rocket carrying 27 Kuiper satellites lifted off from a launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida shortly after 7 p.m. eastern, according to a livestream.
“We had a nice smooth countdown, beautiful weather, beautiful liftoff, and Atlas V is on its way to orbit to take those 27 Kuiper satellites, put them on their way and really start this new era in internet connectivity,” Caleb Weiss, a systems engineer at ULA, said on the livestream following the launch.
The satellites are expected to separate from the rocket roughly 280 miles above Earth’s surface, at which point Amazon will look to confirm the satellites can independently maneuver and communicate with its employees on the ground.
Six years ago Amazon unveiled its plans to build a constellation of internet-beaming satellites in low Earth orbit, called Project Kuiper. The service will compete directly with Elon Musk’s Starlink, which currently dominates the market and has 8,000 satellites in orbit.
The first Kuiper mission kicks off what will need to become a steady cadence of launches in order for Amazon to meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. The agency expects the company to have half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, up in the air by July 2026.
Amazon has booked more than 80 launches to deploy dozens of satellites at a time. In addition to ULA, its launch partners include Musk’s SpaceX (parent company of Starlink), European company Arianespace and Jeff Bezos’ space exploration startup Blue Origin.
Amazon is spending as much as $10 billion to build the Kuiper network. It hopes to begin commercial service for consumers, enterprises and government later this year.
In his shareholder letter earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Kuiper will require upfront investment at first, but eventually the company expects it to be “a meaningful operating income and ROIC business for us.” ROIC stands for return on invested capital.
Investors will be listening for any commentary around further capex spend on Kuiper when Amazon reports first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday.
Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 22, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at a number of Community Health Systems hospitals, causing the facilities to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.
CHS told CNBC that the outage involving Oracle Health, the company’s electronic health record (EHR) system, affected “several” hospitals, leading them to activate “downtime procedures.” Trade publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were hit.
The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement. The outage was resolved on Monday, and was not related to a cyberattack or other security incident.
CHS is based in Tennessee and includes 72 hospitals in 14 states, according to the medical system’s website.
“Despite this being a major outage, our hospitals were able to maintain services with no material impact,” the spokesperson said. “We are proud of our clinical and support teams who worked through the multi-day outage with professionalism and a commitment to delivering high-quality, safe care for patients.”
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Oracle stock this year
Oracle didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses. It’s crucial software within the U.S. health-care system, and outages can cause serious disruptions to patient care. Oracle acquired EHR vendor Cerner in 2022 for $28.3 billion, becoming the second-biggest player in the market, behind Epic Systems.
Now that Oracle’s systems are back online, CHS said that the impacted hospitals are working to “re-establish full functionality and return to normal operations and procedures.”
Oracle’s CHS error comes weeks after the company’s federal electronic health record experienced a nationwide outage. Oracle has struggled with a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the Department of Veterans Affairs, marred by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle’s acquisition, and it temporarily paused deployment of the software in 2023.
Against a volatile market backdrop, the software maker’s stock has gained 45% and is the best performer among companies valued at $5 billion or more, according to FactSet. The closest tech names are VeriSign, up 33%, Okta, up 30%, Robinhood, up 29%, and Uber, up 29%.
“When you think about macroeconomic concerns, you as a company need to be more efficient, and this is where Palantir thrives,” said Bank of America analyst Mariana Pérez Mora.
Palantir has set itself apart in the software world for its artificial-intelligence-enabled tools, gaining recognition for its defense and software contracts with key U.S. government agencies, including the military. In the fourth quarter, its government revenues jumped 45% year-over-year to $343 million.
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Companies have faced immense volatility in 2025 as tariffs threaten to jeopardize global supply chains and halt day-to-day manufacturing operations by hiking costs. Those fears have brought the broad market index down about 7% this year, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite has slumped 11%.
At the same time, the Trump administration has clamped down on government spending, giving Tesla CEO Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency freedom to slash public sector costs. Some administration officials have touted shifting dollars from consulting contracts to commercial software providers like Palantir, said William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma.
“Palantir’s business model is highly aligned with the priorities of the Trump administration in terms of increasing agility and being very quick to market,” he said.
That’s put Palantir in the league with major contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which have outperformed in this year’s downdraft. Many companies in the space are also looking to partner with the firm and tend to flock to defense during recessionary times, DiPalma said.
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Palantir vs. the Nasdaq Composite
CEO Alex Karp has also been a vocal supporter of American innovation and the company’s central role in helping prop up what he called the “single best tech scene in the world” during an interview with CNBC earlier this year. Karp also told CNBC that the U.S. needs an “all-country effort” to compete against emerging adversaries.
But the ride for Palantir has been far from smooth, and shares have been susceptible to volatile swings. Shares sold off nearly 14% during the week that Trump first announced tariffs. Shares rocketed 22% one day in February on strong earnings.
Its inclusion in more passive and quant funds over the years and the growing attention of retail traders has added to that turbulence, DiPalma said. Last year, the company joined both the S&P and Nasdaq. Palantir trades at one of the highest price-to-earnings multiples in software and last traded at 185 times earnings over the next twelve months. That puts a steep bar on the stock.