Target Cuts 1,800 Jobs & Meta To Drop 600 Employees Amid AWS Post-Layoff Woes

American retailer Target announced that it would be cutting around 1,800 jobs, which includes laying off 1,000 corporate employees and closing 800 open positions.

The move will affect roughly 8% of the company’s total corporate workforce and reflects its first major round of layoffs in a decade.

The information was revealed through a memo sent by Target’s incoming CEO, Michael Fiddelke, to employees at its headquarters.

“On Tuesday, we’ll share changes to our headquarters structure as an important step in accelerating how we work,” reads an excerpt from Fiddelke’s memo revealing the numbers. “As we make these changes, I’m asking all U.S. HQ team members to work from home next week. Target in India and our other global teams will follow their in-office routines.”

The layoffs come at a time when the company’s sales have remained stagnant for four years following lowered store traffic, customer backlash, and inventory troubles, as well as driving towards leadership changes.

This includes Fiddelke—who is currently its COO and EVP, and former CFO—replacing longtime CEO and Chairman Brian Cornell, who served from August 2014. Fiddelke will assume the role of CEO on February 1, 2026, with Cornell transitioning to the role of executive chair of the Board of Directors, as per a previous release.

Target’s dwindling sales also affected Cornell’s compensation. While he took home $18.1 million in 2023, his compensation dropped 45% to 9.9 million in 2024, which was 87% lower than his 2020 compensation of $77.5 million.

Even the company’s shares have fallen by 65% since its all-time high in 2021.

The restructuring forms one part of Target’s initiative to bring things back on track.

Target said “new behaviors and sharper priorities” that strengthen its retail leadership in style and design and enable faster execution will be required to “lead with merchandising authority; elevate the guest experience with every interaction; and accelerate technology to enable our team and delight our guests.”

The company expected these moves to make it stronger, faster, and better positioned to serve guests and communities.


In the land of layoffs, social media giant and artificial intelligence (AI) leader Meta plans to offload around 600 employees, as per an internal memo penned by Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang and seen by Axios.

Moreover, the job cuts from Meta’s AI unit come when it’s been bullish on snapping up talent from rival companies offering billion-dollar pay packages, including OpenAI research scientist Ananya Kumar and Thinking Machines co-founder Andrew Tulloch.

“By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” said Wang.

The 600 cuts will affect the company's FAIR AI research, product-related AI and AI infrastructure units, but aren’t expected to touch the newly formed TBD Lab unit, which is still actively recruiting.  

Here, employees will learn on Wednesday (7am Pacific time) if they’re still on board or let go.

Meanwhile, Meta is encouraging outgoing Meta employees to apply for other jobs within Meta, with Wang saying, “This is a talented group of individuals, and we need their skills in other parts of the company.”

The move comes as Meta invests heavily in building data centers, as well as a restructuring of its Superintelligence Labs.

The tech industry has been laden with layoffs over the past few years, thanks to advancements in AI technology.

From startups to multinational corporations, almost every organization has seen its processes affected, replacing humans with AI tools—and some such moves have raised concerns.

This includes hundreds of jobs that were cut in Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit in favor of generative AI (GenAI), which, according to reports, played a major role in the recent service outage that effectively affected the entire internet.

Over 1,000 apps and websites, such as Snapchat, Facebook, Signal, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Duolingo, Canva, Fortnite and other video games, Epic Games Store, Roblox, Zoom, Coinbase, United Airlines, T-Mobile, Starbucks, McDonald's, several banking apps, and more were down. Additionally, a host of Amazon services were also hit.

What was later identified as a DNS (Domain Name System) resolution issue took Amazon three hours to say that the underlying issue had been “fully mitigated,” and over half a day to declare that all services were returned to normal.

In a message shared with Amazon employees in June, CEO Andy Jassy explained the GenAI transition by saying, “As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”

However, not everyone was impressed.

“They legitimately did not know what was breaking for a patently absurd length of time,” said Corey Quinn, a cloud computing expert.

“You can hire a bunch of very smart people who will explain how DNS works at a deep technical level, but the one thing you can’t hire for is the person who remembers that when DNS starts getting wonky, check that seemingly unrelated system in the corner, because it has historically played a contributing role to some outages of yesteryear,” added Quinn.

Quinn’s statements were hurled at what he felt was Amazon’s lack of expertise, experience, and veteran know-how that came from layoffs due to the transition to GenAI.

Do you think companies need to reconsider their stance on GenAI replacing humans or are they on target with it?

Let us know in the comments below!