Amazon
The e-commerce giant’s internal slip exposed the cold, impersonal machinery behind mass redundancies in the era of AI. (PHOTO: Christian Wiediger/Unsplash)

Some workers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) found out they were losing their jobs not from HR, nor from their managers, but from an accidentally sent email expressing sympathy for a termination nobody had yet been informed about.

On Tuesday, a calendar invitation titled 'Send project Dawn email' was mistakenly dispatched to AWS employees, according to Reuters. Attached was a draft message from Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions, offering condolences to staff in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica who had supposedly already been notified that their positions were being eliminated.

The problem: Amazon had not yet informed anyone about these redundancies.

A Sympathy Note for News You Haven't Heard

According to reports, Aubrey's email stated that affected colleagues 'in our organisation' had been notified. It also referenced a forthcoming blog post from Beth Galetti, Amazon's head of human resources, which had not yet appeared on the company's website.

'Changes like this are hard on everyone,' Aubrey wrote. 'These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organisation and AWS for future success.'

The message, reportedly sent by an executive assistant as part of the calendar invite, was quickly cancelled, according to the BBC. A team-wide meeting scheduled for Wednesday was immediately scrapped after the error, according to Slack messages reviewed by Reuters.

Amazon declined to comment on the incident.

The Codename Revealed

The bungled communication inadvertently exposed Amazon's internal codename for its sweeping layoff programme: Project Dawn. The name now accompanies what is shaping up to be the largest workforce reduction in the company's 30-year history.

Reports suggest Amazon was set to remove around 30,000 office jobs, nearly 10% of its non-warehouse staff. By late October, the firm had already acknowledged cutting 14,000 roles. Another round, just as large, now appears imminent this week, impacting areas such as AWS, retail operations, Prime Video, and HR teams.

If fully realised, these reductions would surpass the roughly 27,000 roles Amazon cut between late 2022 and early 2023.

Adding Insult to Injury

The timing could not have been worse. Tuesday's gaffe came just as the 90-day transition period for employees affected by October's cuts was expiring, based on IBT UK's earlier reporting. Workers from that initial wave who failed to secure internal transfers faced their final day on 26 January.

On the same day, Amazon also announced it would close about 70 Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go grocery locations, some of which would be converted to Whole Foods stores. The company did not specify how many retail employees would be affected by these closures.

Ahead of any official confirmation, workers who had been preparing for bad news received a sympathy message — a timing that stung more than comforted. What struck hardest was learning through an error what no one had dared to say aloud.

The Corporate Messaging Versus Reality

CEO Andy Jassy has framed the restructuring as a cultural reset rather than purely cost-cutting. During Amazon's third-quarter earnings call, he stated that the company had accumulated 'a lot more layers' and aimed to operate like 'the world's largest startup.'

Beth Galetti, whose blog post was referenced in the leaked email before it was even published, has previously described generative AI as 'the most transformative technology we've seen since the internet,' IBT UK reported.

Amazon has committed over $100 billion (£73.12 billion) to artificial intelligence infrastructure over the coming years, according to multiple reports, emphasising automation over traditional headcount.

However, when workers learned they were out of a job because of a scheduling glitch rather than an honest conversation, those grand words about change and progress felt hollow. The machinery of corporate restructuring moved forward, but no one had thought to tell the people caught beneath it.

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