[sangel]

My totally uneducated guess is that they leak exaggerated numbers on purpose to make the real numbers look less bad in comparison. The idea being that a few days before the official news everyone is talking about a potential 30 or 40K people layoff. Then, when the official news come out and state that they are laying off 14K people, it sounds less dramatic (in relative terms). This makes people (who are not affected by this) to feel like the news were overblown and are not as significant.

[_fizz_buzz_]

Or it could have been internal politics. Amazon top management set the goal to cut 30k and after internal discussions with lower management they come up with 14k positions that can actually be cut.