Technology

Amazon hikes pay in the UK, plans to hire 15,000 seasonal workers ahead of the holidays

Published

2 years ago

October 9, 2023

admin

Amazon packages move on a conveyer belt at a fulfillment center in England.

Nathan Stirk | Getty Images

Amazon is planning to hike pay for its operations workers in the U.K. and add 15,000 new staff ahead of the holidays, as the e-commerce giant prepares itself for a wave of demand ahead of Christmas.

The company said Monday that it would increase base pay for its frontline operations workers, who pick, pack, store and ship items in its warehouses, to between £11.80 ($14.39) and £12.50 per hour, depending on location.

The pay increase extends to part-time, temporary and seasonal roles, as well as full-time positions, and will come into effect from Oct. 15.

By April 2024, Amazon said the company will be increasing pay further for its workers to between £12.30 and £13 per hour, depending on their location.

Meanwhile, more than 15,000 additional seasonal workers will be hired at Amazon sites across the U.K., the company said.

Amazon said the move represents a £170 million investment from the online retail giant in pay.

Amazon also says this means that minimum starting pay in its U.K. operations will have increased by 20% in two years, or 50% since 2018.

“We have some of the most talented colleagues around, and we’re proud to offer them competitive wages and benefits, as well as fantastic opportunities for career development, all in a safe and modern work environment,” said John Boumphrey, Amazon’s U.K. country manager.

“These are just some of the reasons people want to work at Amazon – whether it’s their first job, a seasonal role or an opportunity for them to advance their career.”

In a response to the move Monday, the GMB Union said the development would bring “little comfort” to Amazon workers facing poverty pay, unsafe working conditions and workplace surveillance.

“Amazon has spent millions fighting their own workers over union rights and fair pay,” Rachel Fagan, a GMB organizer, said in a statement Monday.

“GMB members have forced a pay rise from one of the world’s most powerful corporations – but Amazon can and must do better.”

A rising push for unionization

Amazon is seeking to appease workers at its core warehouse operations, who have been protesting over what they describe as meager levels of pay and poor working conditions.

In January, workers at Amazon’s Coventry fullfilment centers coordinated the first-ever legally-mandated walkout at the company in the U.K.

In coordination with GMB Union, they also submitted a bid to become a legally recognized union, which would have marked a first for the company in the U.K.

The move also comes amid a rising push for unionization among Amazon workers.

Workers at an Amazon site in Coventry, a city in the U.K., staged the first formal industrial action in the country in January. The workers are unhappy about the wage increases they have received which they say are not enough.

The employees have demanded formal union recognition which would give them the ability to collectively bargain with the Amazon over wages.

Earlier this year, however, the Amazon workers pushing for union recognition were dealt a blow in their bid to unionize when an independent arbitration committee sided with Amazon in determining that the workers lacked the required support to achieve union status.

Meanwhile, stateside, a group of workers in New York’s Staten Island became the first group to vote in favor of unionizing at a U.S. facility run by Amazon. Amazon has resisted unionization efforts in the U.S.

The efforts from unions have so far failed to galvanize a wave of unionization globally as many had hoped.

It follows a similar step from Amazon to boost hiring by 250,000 in the U.S. in preparation for the wave of additional demand over the holiday shopping season. The retail giant typically staffs up around the peak holiday shopping season, bringing on hordes of temporary workers so it can better keep up with demand.

Technology

ChatGPT outage: OpenAI’s chatbot is down for some users

Published

3 hours ago

December 2, 2025

admin

ChatGPT outage: OpenAI's chatbot is down for some users

OpenAI’s EMEA startups head Laura Modiano spoke at the Sifted Summit on Wednesday, 8 October.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT is down for some users.

The company said it is “currently experiencing issues,” including “increased ChatGPT error rates,” according to an update on OpenAI’s status page.

“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the status page said.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Roughly 3,000 people reported issues with the chatbot on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages.

The outage comes days after OpenAI disclosed a security breach at Mixpanel one of OpenAI’s data analytics providers.

The breach compromised user information, such as names, emails and other details tied to the OpenAI API.

OpenAI did not disclose how many users were affected, saying in a blog post that an attacker “exported a dataset containing limited customer identifiable information and analytics information.”

OpenAI kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT three years ago. As of October, OpenAI said more than 800 million people use the chatbot each week.

Beta stock jumps 9% on $1 billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Published

6 hours ago

December 2, 2025

admin

Beta stock jumps 9% on billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies strikes $1B electric motor manufacturing deal with Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.

Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.

Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.

Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.

“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.

Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

Published

8 hours ago

December 2, 2025

admin

Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.

DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.

The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.

SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.

Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.

“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.

The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.

AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.

Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.

WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software