cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/46477169

Amazon on Tuesday appeared to have prematurely alerted Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees to layoffs planned for Wednesday morning by sending a commiseration email and team-wide meeting invitation hours early.

Reuters reported on Friday that Amazon intended to lay off thousands of corporate employees starting this week. But the company has not yet informed impacted employees, nor has it confirmed the layoff plan.

The email sent on Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS, wrongly said that impacted employees in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs.

In Slack messages viewed by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said the Wednesday meeting was almost immediately canceled. Amazon referred in the email to the layoffs as "Project Dawn."

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

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

More in the article.

As you might expect when a company announces everything is on fire, everything is on fire: as CNBC pointed out a day after the announcement, the company's share price went down by around 34% after the restructuring was announced. When the stock market closed yesterday the price sat at €4.06 (around $4.80) a share.

Volkswagen may pull its plans for a major Audi factory in the US, citing President Donald Trump’s automotive tariffs.

The car giant’s CEO told Handelsblatt that US levies cost VW $2.5 billion in the first nine months of 2025, and that reductions were necessary.

German investments in the US as a whole fell 45% year-on-year in 2025 as Trump’s duties took hold, Reuters reported, while German exports to the US also fell, although the dollar’s depreciation was likely a factor.

TikTok users have been deleting the app at a higher rate since the company announced that its U.S. operations would be housed in a new joint venture.

The daily average of U.S. users deleting the TikTok app has increased nearly 150% over the past five days compared with the previous three months, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower told CNBC.

Several social media posts pointed to language in the new policy that describes the types of data TikTok may collect, including sensitive information such as “your racial or ethnic origin” as well as “sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.”

Ubisoft shares plunged 34% on Thursday after the maker of the Assassin’s Creed video games announced a major organizational shake-up, alongside plans to shut studios and axe six games.

Ubisoft said studios in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Stockholm would close, with restructurings in those in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Helsinki and Malmö, Sweden.

Amazon.com (AMZN.O), opens new tab is starting to see an uptick in product prices on its e-commerce platform as sellers respond to cost pressures stemming from U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs, the tech giant's CEO, Andy Jassy, told CNBC on Tuesday.

The company had pulled forward its inventory shipments early last year and urged third-party sellers to bring in more stock ahead of time to circumvent tariff-driven surges in shipping costs, but "that supply has run out in the fall," Jassy said in the interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Not Apple, Google or Samsung.

Do you require a (replacement) smartphone for your work at Radboud University? If so, there is a strong possibility that you will receive a Fairphone from 1 February 2026 onwards. Radboud University has decided to choose Fairphone as its standard company smartphone model for reasons of sustainability, cost efficiency and management support.

Crosspost

“Why is ‘Office is dead’ talk of the town again?” Windows Latest asks. The answer being viral posts on X, “particularly by Perplexity AI, claiming that Microsoft has killed the Office brand and that millions of users were now using AI overnight.”

“BREAKING,” Perplexity posted last week. "Microsoft just renamed Office to "Microsoft 365 Copilot app. 400 million users just became ‘AI users’ overnight." This is a problem because the “AI everything” approach now being adopted by Microsoft and Google in particular raises significant security and privacy concerns.