How bogus stories about Amazon laying off 14,000 managers spread like wildfire across the internet

If you’ve been on Google or virtually any social media website over the last few days, you might have seen stories about Amazon layoffs making the rounds.

And if you were curious enough to click through to any of those stories, you might have discovered that Amazon is supposedly planning to lay off 14,000 managers by the end of this quarter—a stunning figure, even for a company as big as Amazon.

But that figure is untrue. Not only that, it seems to have been essentially conjured up out of nowhere, before being picked up by a stream of headlines on Google News, viral Reddit threads, and would-be LinkedIn influencers dissecting it as if it were fact.

In reality, what’s happening is less a story about an e-commerce giant flattening its management structure, and more a cautionary tale about how quickly and indiscriminately false news can spread in our current media environment.

What did Amazon announce?

The first thing to know is that Amazon did not announce 14,000 layoffs, nor did it say it wanted to trim its manager ranks by that number.

“This claim is false and based on inaccurate assumptions,” Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser told Fast Company. “In September 2024, we shared with employees that we set a goal to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% across our organizations because it was the right time to bring us closer to customers and reinforce our culture of ownership. There are a number of ways to achieve that increase without eliminating roles. We’ve now reached that goal, which we believe will allow our teams to move even faster as they innovate for customers.”

The contributor-to-manager plan referenced in Glasser’s statement was no secret. It was the subject of a memo from CEO Andy Jassy, which was shared publicly on Amazon’s website months ago. In it, Jassy said the plan would “remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today.”

Although that definitely sounds like Amazon was looking to have fewer managers, nowhere does Jassy say anything about 14,000 managers. And yet that figure was reported by a large number of online news outlets—many apparently based in India—just this week. So frequent were these reports that “Amazon layoffs” became a top trending search on Google.

Most of these stories contained vague references to sources, or no sources at all, with some simply attributing the news to “media reports.”

At the same time, many of these outlets were indexed by Google News, giving them an air of legitimacy. And so if you were to scan headlines after searching for “Amazon layoffs” on Google, you could easily come away with the idea that Amazon is laying off managers by the thousands.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment about whether any of these stories violate its content guidelines for Google News.

Where did the 14,000 figure come from?

A reverse-chronological search of recent Amazon-related headlines reveals that at least one of the earlier stories cited Business Insider as the original source of the 14,000 figure, but Business Insider never reported that.

In October, BI did report on a Morgan Stanley note in which the investment bank estimated that Amazon could save as much as $3.6 billion if it eliminated roughly 13,834 manager roles. BI’s headline rounded that estimate up to 14,000, but again, the story was not about layoffs that actually happened. It was about a speculative analysis for investors performed by a third-party company.

What could likely have happened is that another news outlet misinterpreted the number, applied it to actual layoffs, and ran with it. It’s unclear which outlet was the first to do this, although India’s Financial Express website appears to have published one of the earliest stories. Its article, published on Tuesday, does not include any linked sources or even a byline. (We’ve reached out to the Financial Express to clarify the sourcing for the article.)

Over the next few days, other outlets followed with their own version of the Amazon layoffs story. Those stories begot more stories, all citing each other or merely reporting the figure as fact. Cue the social media influencers, who presumably saw those headlines and used them as an opportunity to snag some engagement by weighing into Amazon’s strategy.

Why is this happening and why should anyone care?

Figuring out what’s real and what’s fake in our current information environment is difficult enough, but social media algorithms, incentives for engagement and clicks, and a lack of quality control on the part of large platforms are all making the situation worse.

It’s not a new problem. Last year, we wrote about how a string of bogus stories about $12,000 stimulus checks from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) trended on Google for several days, driven largely by websites that had repurposed old URLs.

But these phenomena are not victimless. False news can create real-life harms, whether it’s raising hopes among low-income Americans that a giant stimulus check is on the way to help them pay their bills, or creating unnecessary anxiety for people who happen to work as managers at one of the biggest companies in the world.

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