Layoffs, abusive calls, and AI fears: Inside the front lines of Amazon’s ‘customer obsession’ promise

Longtime employees say Amazon’s cost-focused environment has exacerbated what some consider to be a mental health crisis among the company’s CS agents. — Fortune/Getty Images/Amazon/The New York Times

The bad news blindsided Amazon customer service employees across the globe in mid-May: More layoffs had arrived. This time, it was middle managers.

In one Amazon office in Europe, a senior customer service official informed employees during a group meeting that a restructuring would remove an entire level of middle management, but since he refrained from using words like “layoffs”, it wasn’t initially clear whether impacted employees would be out of a job completely or simply reassigned. As employees exchanged puzzled looks trying to decipher what exactly was transpiring, they finally realised that some in attendance had effectively just been laid off.