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Amazon’s latest flurry of layoffs will hit the company’s Stores division, the business unit responsible for its online retail storefront.

The cuts will affect fewer than 1,000 workers this time—a much smaller reduction than a round of mass layoffs seen earlier this year. Employees shared news of the layoffs in internal Slack messages viewed by Business Insider, which first reported the development. The restructuring appears to have impacted customer service, engineering, and marketplace support roles within Amazon’s booming retail business. 

Amazon confirmed layoffs to its retail division in a statement provided to Fast Company. “We’ve adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities,” an Amazon spokesperson wrote. “As part of these changes, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles, and we’re committed to supporting affected employees through their transition.” The company declined to provide further details about the eliminated roles.

The job cuts come in the midst of Amazon’s early fall sale, Prime Big Deal Days, which runs this week. The round of layoffs is the latest in a series of recent smaller workforce reductions. In March, Amazon trimmed a handful of jobs in its robotics division, followed by cuts to its artificial general intelligence group in July.

The new layoffs aren’t as dramatic as some of Amazon’s recent reductions, but workers in affected divisions will feel them deeply nonetheless. 

In January, Amazon announced that it would cut 16,000 jobs across its workforce. Those layoffs followed news last October that the online retail giant would slash 14,000 corporate positions to reduce layers in its human workforce and reorient around its AI priorities. Amazon human resources executive Beth Galetti described the late 2025 reduction in workforce as a push to reduce bureaucracy within the company and to double down on its “biggest bets.” 

“This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before,” Galetti wrote in an October blog post about the layoffs. “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”

Amazon is a company synonymous with hyperaggressive growth, but the retail titan shrinks its own enormous footprint from time to time, too. Earlier this year, the company announced that it would shutter all of its brick-and-mortar convenience and grocery stores, which operated under the Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh brands, though some of the 70 closed locations would reopen as Whole Foods stores. 

As Amazon winds down one retail experiment, it’s gearing up for another even bigger one: Next year, the company will launch its first big-box megastore in the Chicago suburbs, aiming to compete with rivals like Target and Costco.