Amazon has started laying off contractors working on the recruiting side of the business. As per reports, the employees have been getting notifications since the past week, telling them that their assignments will be ending abruptly. Apart from laying off the contractual workers, the Jeff Bezos-led company is also planning to fire around 10,000 full-time employees. This will be the biggest layoff in the history of the tech company. However, Amazon is not alone. Of late, several Big Tech companies, such as Meta and Twitter, have also been laying off employees as the tech industry in the US, besotted by global macroeconomic headwinds, look towards trimming their costs after months of lacklustre growth. A report by The Wall Street Journal has cited sources claiming that Amazon has already begun the process of reducing its overall workforce. The first in line are the contractors working in recruiting jobs. The laying off of 10,000 full-time employees is also expected to begin this week. As per the WSJ report, however, the layoffs might not be made in one decision, and the numbers could vary. Amazon is reportedly planning to make the job cuts based on each team’s requirements. Amazon will be reducing its workforce from Amazon’s devices business, which also includes the home automation range of Alexa devices. Human resources is another vertical within the company that is expected to see major reductions. Amazon has a sizeable workforce across the globe. Even if 10,000 employees were sacked, it will only constitute 1 per cent of the global workforce (including contractual employees). According to the report, Amazon had around 1.5 million people in its global workforce. Amazon announced a hiring freeze in October. The company has also redeployed some employees to more profitable teams and verticals and closed down several teams. Regarding warehouses, Amazon is also expecting lower customer demand due to rising inflation. Despite being a holiday season, Amazon expects the present quarter to be a difficult one. Twitter and Meta also announced major layoffs earlier this month. Twitter removed around half of its workforce amounting to around 3700 employees. Musk has also removed around 80 per cent of the contractual workers, many of whom were responsible for content moderation. Meta removed 11,000 employees and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the entire responsibility for layoffs.