Amazon Bungles 'Project Dawn' Layoff Launch With Premature Internal Email Leak

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"Project Dawn" leaks trigger widespread panic as an accidental email leaves thousands of Amazon employees bracing for a corporate cull.

Amazon's carefully managed plan to slash thousands of additional corporate roles hit a humiliating snag Tuesday evening when a premature internal email inadvertently confirmed a new wave of terminations. The misfired communication, which carried the internal codename "Project Dawn," alerted employees at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to a restructuring effort before the company was prepared to formally notify those on the chopping block.

The leak stems from a draft email written by Colleen Aubrey, Senior Vice President of Applied AI Solutions at AWS, which was attached to a calendar invitation and blasted to multiple employees. Though the invite was quickly withdrawn, the damage was done, exposing a massive redundancy plan affecting staff across the U.S., Canada, and Costa Rica.

The 'Project Dawn' Blunder

The accidental message did not just hint at changes; it spoke of them in the past tense, wrongly stating that impacted employees had already been informed. The internal panic was immediate, with workers taking to Slack, Blind, and Reddit to piece together the scope of the "Project Dawn" initiative.

“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Aubrey wrote in the leaked email. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”

This "second wave" follows an October 2025 culling that saw 14,000 workers exit the company. Internal sources and analyst reports suggest Amazon is aiming for a total reduction of approximately 30,000 corporate roles—nearly 10% of its white-collar workforce—by May 2026.

Targeting 'Managerial Bloat'

While Amazon’s core retail business remains a behemoth, its cloud engine, AWS, is facing a strategic overhaul. The company is aggressively trimming legacy support and program management roles to pivot resources toward generative AI and data center investments.

CEO Andy Jassy has been blunt about the rationale, distancing the cuts from immediate financial distress or AI displacement. Instead, he is framing the purge as a necessary "culture" fix to eliminate the bureaucracy that ballooned during the pandemic.

“It’s not really financially driven and it’s not even really AI-driven,” Jassy told analysts during a recent earnings call. “It’s culture. If you grow as fast as we did for several years... you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.”

High-Stakes Restructuring

The layoffs are concentrated in high-salary corporate divisions, specifically:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• People Experience and Technology (PXT) (Human Resources)
• Prime Video
• Retail Operations

Despite the massive scale of the cuts, Amazon’s frontline workforce of 1.5 million warehouse and fulfillment employees remains untouched. For those in the crosshairs, the company has historically offered 90 days of full pay and benefits while they seek internal roles, though it remains unclear if the "Project Dawn" cohort will receive the same grace period as their predecessors.

As the 90-day transition period for October’s victims expired this Monday, January 26, the arrival of "Project Dawn" signals that Amazon's "lean era" is only just beginning.