Amazon has cut roughly 250 jobs from its devices and services division, weeks after launching a run of new products including Kindle e-readers and tablets.
Hiru News reported at 6.20 p.m. Colombo time on Thursday, crediting the Reuters news agency, that the company has confirmed the cuts.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company had taken a difficult decision to remove a small number of positions, and told Reuters that no more than 250 roles are affected. The filing says those affected are predominantly software development staff.
What the division does
Devices and services is the Amazon unit responsible for the company’s own hardware — the Kindle e-reader line, Fire tablets and the Echo range — rather than its retail marketplace or its cloud business, Amazon Web Services.
The sequencing is the unusual part. The cuts follow immediately after a product launch cycle, not a cancelled one: Hiru’s filing explicitly dates them to the period after the new Kindle readers and tablets were introduced. Job reductions more commonly follow a product line being wound down.
Not reported
The filing does not say which teams or which countries the cuts fall in, whether the roles are being eliminated or relocated, or what severance arrangements apply. It does not give a total headcount for the devices and services division, so the 250 figure cannot be read as a proportion.
Nothing is reported on whether further cuts are planned, on how the reduction relates to Amazon’s other recent staffing decisions, or on what the company says the division’s product roadmap now requires. No Amazon executive is named or quoted beyond an unnamed spokesperson.
On sourcing: Reuters originated this report, and Hiru credits it. Reuters is a verified newsroom for this desk’s credibility index but does not return article content to this desk’s fetchers, so it could not be cited directly and is named here as the originating wire. A search of the other fetchable verified international outlets returned no independent account of these cuts. The story is therefore carried on Hiru’s filing alone, and the figures above are Reuters’ as relayed by Hiru.
There is no Sri Lankan angle in the filing: no Sri Lanka-based roles are mentioned, and Amazon does not report a corporate presence in the country.
