In a note sent to employees yesterday by Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios said: “We’ve identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact.

“As a result of these decisions, we will be eliminating several hundred roles across the Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios organisation.”

The note continued that American employees affected by the job cuts would be notified immediately, while affected employees in other regions would receive the news by “the end of the week”.

“We are following local processes, which may include time for consultation with employee representative bodies, possibly resulting in longer timelines to communicate in some countries.”

A spokesperson for Amazon Australia declined to comment on whether the announcement would affect Australian employees.

Twitch, Amazon’s online gaming livestream business has revealed it is also shedding more than 500 jobs in a separate announcement.

The cuts reportedly represents about 35 per cent of its workforce.

In a note posted to the Twitch website, CEO Dan Clancy said:

“Today I have some incredibly difficult news to share.

“As you all know, we have worked hard over the last year to run our business as sustainably as possible.

“Unfortunately, we still have work to do to right-size our company and I regret having to share that we are taking the painful step to reduce our headcount by just over 500 people across Twitch.”

The note continued: “While the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organisation has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today.”

It follows the sacking of around 400 Twitch staff in March 2023.

Amazon recently cut some jobs at its Alexa voice assistant division and the online retail and tech giant cut more than 27,000 jobs last year as part of a wave of US tech lay-offs.