Mashable: Before this change, Amazon had a policy that made it easy for people to work from home or in a hybrid setting.

According to a memo sent out by CEO Andy Jassy on Friday, thousands of Amazon workers will have to go back to the office at least three days a week.

Before this change, Amazon had a policy that made it easy for people to work from home or in a hybrid setting. That policy will end on May 1. It also comes a month after Amazon said the state of the economy would force them to let go of more than 18,000 workers.

Jassy defended the change in policy by saying that working in person would improve teamwork and the culture of the company. He did this by saying that the company's headquarters are in places like Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and dozens of other places around the world.

The CEO acknowledges in the memo that bringing back tens of thousands of employees to offices around the world isn't easy, so they're going to give the teams that need to do that work some time to make a plan. He goes on to say that the office experience won't be perfect at first, but it will get better over the next few months (and years) as the real estate and facilities teams work out the bugs and change how Amazon wants its offices to be set up to fit the new ways it wants people to work.

Shortly after the pandemic started, Amazon said that it thought people would be back at work in October 2020. The company kept pushing back that date because new waves of the coronavirus caused cities all over the world to lock down.