This isn't the whole story though. While Amazon might have 1.5m employees, many of those are going to be in the fulfilment and distribution process, which is a very different place to being in engineering/product/finance/business/marketing working in an office.

I think it would be more useful to split the company down that line, in which case Amazon probably have ~300k(?) on the office side, and this represents more like a 4-5% layoff, a level at which people will really notice it.