Amazon Layoffs India: 16,000 jobs at risk as Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad may face impact

According to reports, Amazon is planning another major round of job cuts in 2026, with up to 16,000 corporate roles expected to be eliminated globally. A Reuters report says Amazon India layoffs could hit Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad the hardest. It would be Amazon's second mass layoff in four months, having previously cut about 14,000 jobs in October 2025. Collectively, the cuts seem to go hand in hand with a previous announcement that Amazon has established a goal to reduce its staff count by almost 30,000 employees by the middle of 2026.

Which teams are likely to be impacted?

The reported Amazon corporate layoffs are expected to affect multiple divisions, including Amazon AWS job cuts, retail, Prime Video, devices and HR teams. The layoffs can cut across various business lines, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail, Prime Video, the devices division, and People Experience and Technology (HR) sector. Although the overall extent is yet to be confirmed: until Amazon officially announces it, white-collar positions are the ones that will be impacted most.

Amazon’s operations in Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad form the backbone of its India workforce, supporting backend engineering, customer operations, content moderation and cloud services. Indian offices are important in the backend engineering, customer service, content moderation, and cloud services. The operations hub in Chennai, especially, is said to be experiencing even more severe cuts, though Bengaluru and Hyderabad, the centres of technology in Amazon are also at risk.

In the October 2025 layoffs, between 800-1000 employees in India had been impacted, so this new wave would have a potentially much larger effect on the technologically advanced workforce in the country.

Why Amazon is cutting jobs again

Analysts link the latest round of cuts to Amazon’s shift toward automation and AI-driven jobs, reducing dependency on large human teams across operations and HR. Amazon has not yet given any official explanation. Nevertheless, Reuters and previous workforce strategy publications state that the company is trying to flatten the organisational hierarchy developed in pandemic-era hypergrowth. The drive is also associated with the productivity gains produced by AI, which are lowering the necessity to employ vast human groups in operations, HR, and content processes.

Amazon also announced its previous plans to fully automate warehouse employment in the US with AI-driven robotics by 2033 and may avoid hiring up to 600,000 employees. Although the intention behind that policy is on logistics, it indicates a wider move towards automation-based cost models in business units.

Amazon workforce reduction in India

For India’s tech ecosystem, this Amazon workforce reduction signals rising pressure on corporate IT and support roles, especially those not tied directly to revenue generation. In the case of India, the tech ecosystem, it is a sign that the pressure has started to mount on corporate and IT services functions, particularly those related to internal and platform support functions and not revenue generation. AWS engineering and cloud optimisation teams might be relatively safe, yet the HR, operations, and content teams are more vulnerable.

To the Indian professional the trend strengthens the call to reskill AI infrastructure, cloud architecture, and automation governance- which are areas that continue to experience demand even with the slowdowns in hiring.