As anxiety over another round of layoffs grows at Amazon, employees are coping the way many Big Tech workers do in uncertain times — by making memes.

According to reports, the company is expected to cut thousands more corporate roles as early as next week, marking yet another wave of job losses after nearly 14,000 positions were eliminated in October. With no official companywide communication so far, employees have taken to an internal Slack channel with over 26,000 members, sharing humour and sarcasm to ease mounting tension.

Two-pizza rule becomes a punchline

Much of the humour centres on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ famous “two-pizza rule”, originally meant to keep teams small enough to be fed by two pizzas. As teams shrink further, employees are using the rule to highlight just how “lean” their groups may soon become.

One widely shared meme showed a tiny slice of pizza captioned, “How we feed two-pizza teams now.” Another featured Amazon Web Services-branded pizza boxes with the line, “Did someone say two-pizza team?”, reflecting fears that cuts may hit the cloud division hardest.

Employees also joked about what qualifies as “reasonably sized” pizzas, debating whether Costco or Domino’s would make the cut.

Coping with humour and dread

Beyond pizza jokes, darker humour has surfaced. One meme referenced January 27 — a rumoured key date — using a scene from The Shining, with “AWS” replacing the character’s face. Another mocked corporate jargon, linking job cuts to CEO Andy Jassy’s past comments about staying “nimble”.

Others shared checklist-style memes capturing collective anxiety: “Able to log in,” “Mail and Slack working,” and “No random HR meeting”.

A familiar tech culture response

Amazon is not alone in this phenomenon. Similar meme waves emerged at Google after mass layoffs in 2023, showing how humour has become a shared coping mechanism in tech workplaces during periods of uncertainty.

While memes offer brief relief, they also underline a deeper unease — as employees wait, refresh calendars, and brace themselves for what the coming days may bring.