US technology giant Amazon has confirmed it will cut 16,000 jobs - hours after it told staff about a new round of global redundancies in an email apparently sent in error.
The email, which has been seen by the BBC, was sent late on Tuesday and refers to a swathe of employees in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica having been laid off as part of an effort to strengthen the company.
The message was apparently shared by mistake, as it was quickly cancelled.
Early on Wednesday, Amazon announced job reductions as part of a plan to remove bureaucracy at the firm.
Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology at Amazon, said on Wednesday it was not planning to make broad reductions every few months, referring to Amazon's announcement of 14,000 corporate job cuts in October.
While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now.
Amazon employs around 1.5 million people globally, with around 350,000 in corporate roles.
Amazon has not said where the latest job losses will fall or which countries will be affected.
Project Dawn
On Tuesday, a draft email written by Colleen Aubrey, a senior vice president at Amazon Web Services (AWS), was included in a calendar invitation sent by an executive assistant to several Amazon workers.
The title of the invitation was Send project Dawn email, an apparent reference to Amazon's code name for the job redundancies.
While the email made clear that the cuts were happening at Amazon, employees had not yet been officially informed.
This is a continuation of the work we've been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers, the email said.
Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success, it added.
The layoffs had been expected by Amazon employees for weeks, according to a former worker who asked not to be identified.
The broad understanding among staff had been that bosses intended to cut a total of around 30,000 roles, the former employee added, who left Amazon as part of a redundancy round in October.
Affected workers were invited to reapply for open positions at Amazon, though the number of such roles was limited. People who did not move to another role received severance pay based on how long they had worked at the company.
'Time to rethink'
Since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO four years ago, his successor Andy Jassy has navigated the company through several rounds of layoffs while introducing a stricter work culture.
In-office work is now mandatory five days a week, making Amazon one of the only major tech companies to require its employees to be in the office full-time.
Jassy indicated that this era at Amazon is a time to rethink everything we've ever done, urging a reevaluation of operational strategies as the company adapts to rapid changes in the market.
