Amazon Accidentally Sent Layoff Alarm At 5 AM; Employees Panic in Slacks

KEY POINTS

•Amazon Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey’s assistant accidentally sent a 5 a.m. calendar invite about layoffs on Tuesday.
•The invite referenced 'Project Dawn,' an efficiency effort tied to planned cuts affecting US, Canada, and Costa Rica.
•Thousands of Amazon corporate roles are expected to be cut in this second round since October’s 14,000 layoffs.

On a sprightly Tuesday morning, Amazon's Colleen Aubrey—Senior VP of AWS Solutions—sparked a company-wide panic by accidentally sending a 5 a.m. Pacific calendar invite titled 'Send Project Dawn email' hinting at massive job cuts across the US, Canada, and Costa Rica. The email, apparently penned by Aubrey but dispatched by an overzealous assistant, referenced 'Project Dawn,' an efficiency initiative that sounds less like a breakfast plan and more like a corporate apocalyptic event. With thousands of jobs on the chopping block for the second layoff wave since October’s 14,000 cuts, a 36,000-strong Slack channel buzzed with employees nervously questioning if they, too, were 'impacted or mistakenly included.' One employee hilariously theorized that the AI misfired, sending a calendar invite instead of the layoff email—because who wouldn’t want to mark the end of their tenure in glowing calendar red? Of course, Amazon’s PR ghosted every request for comment, leaving anxious staff and Business Insider readers to speculate this production of 'Redundancy: The Musical' is only just beginning.