I think these moves are possible if we're not in a recession. If Amazon underperformed over the year, and its earnings are lower than estimated, they could be simply cutting costs in Q4 to offset the lowered earnings. The cause of that underperformance is really what would tell you if we're headed for a recession and Amazon has their fingers in so many pies it'd be hard to attribute laying off 1/150th of their workforce to the overall economy I think.

That this is happening at a number of big tech companies isn't a surprise I don't think. The biggest layoffs this year so far have been at companies that made large scale changes (Meta, Twitter) or over-hired over the course of the pandemic when that level of business turned out not to be permanent (Stripe, Shopify).

It's possible that this is industry-specific. Tech companies exploded during the pandemic if they had anything to do with stuff you do indoors, and this is the real "post-pandemic" year (talking economically).

Other industries which took it on the chin during the pandemic are recovering well this year, notably anything travel-related seems to be doing incredibly well and some companies are on track for banner years.

That said, I suspect we're going to see a few quarters of stagnant growth (0% to 0.3%) or mild contraction (0% to -0.3%), maybe not enough in a row to declare recession.