Amazon employees are doing what Big Tech workers often do when they’re anxious about layoffs: making memes.
The company is expected to cut thousands more corporate roles as soon as next week, Business Insider reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. This coming round would mark another wave of mass layoffs at Amazon in just a few months, following the roughly 14,000 jobs eliminated in October.
In the absence of official companywide communication, workers have been trying to ease tension in an internal Slack channel with more than 26,000 employees who joined by posting memes and jokes, which Business Insider viewed.
The focus of their snark? Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos’ famous “two-pizza rule,” originally designed to keep meetings lean and productive. The rule was simple: never have a meeting so large that two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group.
As the company continues to thin its ranks, employees are using the same logic to point out just how much leaner their teams are about to become.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
One meme showed a single, thin sliver of pizza with the caption “how we feed two pizza teams.”
Another image featured two Amazon Web Services-branded pizza boxes, with the caption “did someone say 2 pizza team?” The meme is a nod to the company’s cloud division, where many of the cuts are expected to land.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been on a team that could be completely fed with just two reasonably sized pizzas until you were still hungry very frugal,” one employee wrote in the Slack channel. “Increasing ‘span-of-control’ for managers seems to be the new rage.”
Others wondered if two Costco pizzas would be considered “reasonably sized.”
“I was thinking more like Domino’s Large pizzas,” another employee wrote.
The pizza jokes weren’t the only coping mechanism. Employees also shared non-pizza memes.
One riffed on the rumored timing, splashing “JANUARY 27TH” over the scene from “The Shining” showing Jack Nicholson’s character smashing through a door with an ax and “AWS” over his face.
Another meme used the “panik/kalm” template to mock corporate buzzwords. It shows an error message about email not working, presumably because the employee was laid off, with the words “Mail not working (have I become Nimble?!)”, referring to CEO Andy Jassy’s 2025 remarks about cutting jobs to stay nimble.
Other posts leaned into the dread of the unknown: one meme laid out a checklist for employees for January 27: “able to login,” “mail and Slack works,” and “no random HR meeting in calendar.”
Another simply captured the vibe in all caps: “I don’t know what will happen on 27 Jan and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.”
Amazon isn’t the first tech giant to see a nervous workforce poke fun at its internal culture. In 2023, Google employees flooded the company’s internal message boards with memes mocking its lavish developer conference, which came months after it laid off 12,000 employees.
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