Amazon Layoffs Hit India Amid Great Indian Festival 2026

By Shefali Rana | BizGossips.in

Amazon is cutting jobs again — and the timing is difficult to ignore.

As the e-commerce giant pushes one of its biggest shopping events, Amazon has confirmed another round of workforce reductions, primarily affecting its Stores division, the business behind its core retail operations. Fewer than 1,000 white-collar employees globally are believed to have been affected, with workers in the US, India and the UK among those receiving layoff notices.

The uncomfortable part is that the cuts are arriving while Amazon is aggressively selling.

In India, the layoffs coincide with the Great Indian Festival, Amazon’s major annual shopping event. Globally, the cuts came around Prime Big Deal Days, which began on October 6 and ran through October 7.

For a company built to handle enormous shopping demand, shrinking the workforce while pushing major sales campaigns creates an awkward contrast: customer activity may be booming, but employee numbers are moving in the opposite direction.

India Is Also In The Firing Line

Amazon has not disclosed exactly how many employees in India have been affected.

However, reports indicate that workers across several functions have received layoff notices. Internal Slack messages shared by affected employees reportedly point to teams linked to customer service, selling partner services, and marketplace support.

NDTV has also reported impacts involving engineering roles within Amazon's retail operations.

That makes the latest cuts more significant than a simple reduction in an isolated corporate function. Several of the affected areas are connected to the machinery that keeps Amazon's retail marketplace running.

And that raises an obvious question: if Amazon expects massive shopping demand, why is it reducing parts of the workforce supporting that business?

Another Round After Thousands Of Job Cuts

The latest layoffs also cannot be viewed in isolation.

Amazon has already gone through a much larger restructuring that resulted in approximately 30,000 job cuts, beginning last year and continuing into January. Smaller reductions have followed across different parts of the company.

Amazon says it has adjusted parts of its Stores business because the new structure is expected to better support its priorities. The company has described the latest reduction as affecting a “small number” of roles.

From a corporate perspective, that may be accurate.

From an employee's perspective, however, a small number is still a significant number when your job is one of them.

Is Amazon Correcting Its Pandemic Hiring?

The current restructuring also brings back a question that has followed Amazon since the pandemic.

During the COVID-19 period, online shopping surged as consumers stayed home. Amazon dramatically expanded its workforce to keep up with that extraordinary demand.

Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos has previously pointed to that pandemic-era expansion when discussing the company's workforce adjustments. In a Fox News interview, Bezos said Amazon had increased its employee base substantially as people shifted toward online shopping.

The problem is that pandemic demand was never going to last forever.

Amazon now appears to be operating in a very different environment — one where automation, efficiency, cost control, and productivity are becoming increasingly important.

The Bigger Shift: Growth Is No Longer The Only Goal

The latest layoffs may therefore represent something bigger than another round of cost-cutting.

Amazon is still investing heavily in technology and artificial intelligence while trying to make its businesses more efficient. That creates a fundamental shift in how large technology companies think about headcount.

The old formula was relatively straightforward:

More customers → more demand → more employees.

The emerging formula looks different:

More customers → more automation → higher productivity per employee.

That does not necessarily mean Amazon's business is shrinking. It may mean the company believes it can handle growth with a leaner workforce.

But for employees, the distinction offers little comfort.

Sales Are Up. So Why Are Jobs Down?

That is ultimately the uncomfortable question behind this latest round.

Amazon can simultaneously experience strong shopping demand and reduce headcount because revenue growth and employment growth are not the same thing.

A company can sell more products while using fewer employees if technology, automation, restructuring or productivity improvements allow it to do so.

For Amazon, that may improve efficiency.

For workers in India and elsewhere, however, it signals a more competitive corporate environment where simply being part of a growing business may no longer guarantee job security.

Amazon's latest layoffs may not be about a slowdown in shopping at all. They could be about something more fundamental: the company wants future growth to require fewer people to deliver it.

Disclaimer: This article is based on reports from Reuters, NDTV, and The Times of India. Amazon has confirmed the latest workforce reductions but has not disclosed the exact number of employees affected in India. The views and analysis presented are for informational purposes only.