> The news industry is incredibly desperate for stories about layoffs it seems.

I don't think this is an informed take. Amazon not only cancelled all hires but also increased the number of employees they want to fire. From the first time in the company's history, they explicitly announced they were going to fire people in a purely cost-cutting approach and in a way that was not tied to employee performance.

If anything, this signals that Amazon changed radically it's corporate strategy from a growth-oriented strategy to a consolidation one. This has strong implications on the company's revenue expectations.