Amazon is reportedly planning to layoff 3% of its workforce, or around 10,000 employees, beginning this week. This will be the largest firing in its history and will focus on the retail, human resources, and devices divisions. 

This latest development is a continuation of several cuts the tech company has made recently. 

In the past year, Amazon has shut down many of its initiatives such as Amazon Care, Fabric.com, and Scout, a home delivery robot. It also shut down 68 brick-and-mortar stores, including all of its Amazon Book stores, and 44 of its warehouses. 

In recent months, the company has had a hiring freeze. It started with some of its smaller teams before affecting its core retail business, and most recently, the company’s corporate side. Last week, Amazon’s stock fell and lost the company $1 trillion in market value.

During the last two years, Amazon has doubled its workforce to meet the demands of increased online shopping due to the pandemic. The company is finding — like a lot of other tech companies are — that the uptick in business was not permanent. 

Beginning in the summer, there have been mass firings at several big tech companies. In light of this, many of these companies’ CEOs have taken a self-blaming approach to firing. 

Tobi Lutke, the CEO of Shopify, and Niraj Shah, the CEO of Wayfair Inc., have come out to say that they took a bet on whether the COVID fueled surge would become permanent and lost. 

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg echoed these sentiments in his statement, “At the start of COVID, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments.”

Zuckerberg added, “Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”

As a result of this, Meta announced last week that it would have to lay off 11,000 of its employees.

Twitter has also been in the news for mass layoffs, with its staff being cut by about half. Unlike with other tech companies, these layoffs appear to be related to new owner Elon Musk’s attempts to cut costs.