Laid-off Amazon employees are posting through it on social media

• Amazon is laying off 14,000 corporate employees.
• Some workers who said they were laid off from Amazon shared their experiences online.
• They turned to platforms like TikTok and LinkedIn with a mix of jokes and calls to action.

One woman is processing being laid off while on a tropical vacation. Another’s “get ready with me” video turned sour after she said she’d learned her fate.

With as many as 14,000 Amazon employees set to lose their jobs, some workers who said they were laid off by the e-commerce company are posting through it on social media. Several of them are sharing updates in real time as they process their feelings about the reductions.

The person who posted the “get ready with me” video, for example, had planned to take her followers along with her for a morning run when she said he learned she was affected by the cuts.

“I no longer have a job to go to after I go running,” the TikToker said in one of her videos.

A few others are posting almost hourly updates on how they’re doing since the cuts were announced. One user, who said she’s on vacation in Mauritius, posted a video two hours after she said she learned she was laid off.

She said it was “divine intervention.”

“I’m not freaking out,” she said. “I’m also still very much in shock.”

Others don’t seem to be taking it so well. One TikTok creator who said she worked at Amazon told followers on Tuesday, when the company announced the layoffs, to place bets on whether she’d be affected. The next day, she said she’d been let go after more than eight years at the company.

Since then, her updates have been a mix of jokes, including telling her cats the news, and crying videos. One of her videos has gone viral, with nearly 200,000 views in less than 24 hours.

Some posts were bittersweet. One person who said their Amazon Games studio was affected said they would work with their team again “in a heartbeat.”

Others hit the ground running on LinkedIn, changing their status on the professional networking platform to “#OpenToWork” and asking connections for leads on open positions.

On Reddit, dozens of people have begun crowdsourcing a list of affected roles and divisions to determine which areas were hit the hardest.

Posting through the pain of being laid off isn’t a new concept. Many people, specifically Gen Zers, have gone viral in posts about losing their jobs. It’s all about validating their feelings about being fired and seeking human connection, one workplace researcher told Business Insider in 2024.

Amazon declined to comment on the social media posts.

This week, one woman said she was working in her “dream role” as a social media manager at Amazon before being laid off less than a month after celebrating her one-year anniversary in the position and a week before her birthday.

“I guess my present from Amazon came a little bit early,” she said in the clip.