A former Amazon employee has said that the company is running out of both warehouse space and employees.

The comments as the e-commerce giant announces a lower sales growth forecast for the second half of the year.

Andrea Leigh, vice president at e-commerce optimisation business Ideoclick, told Reuters: “Amazon is running out of available space. They’re also running out of labour.”

According to the news agency, last year Amazon turned goods away from its warehouses for weeks because it didn’t have either the people or space to fulfil the items safely.

It said that the e-commerce giant needs to invest billions in extending its existing warehouse and delivery system, despite already having almost doubled its network over the past year and a half.

Logistics consultancy MWPVL told Reuters that Amazon is planning to add 517 facilities to its global distribution infrastructure in the next few years. This represents an additional 176 million square feet on top of the existing 402 million.


Amazon did not confirm the MWPVL estimates.

However, the company did provide comments made on its latest earnings call by Amazon chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky: “For the trailing 12 months ending Q2, capex and equipment finance leases increased 74 per cent versus the prior trailing 12 months and as usual, most of our 2021 spend and building openings are planned in the 2nd half of the year. This is all part of a multiyear investment cycle for us. Unit volumes, while obviously growing at lower rates off last year’s large comp, continue to remain high and we see strong demand for FBA from third-party sellers. So there’s more work to do, including additional build-outs of our FCs as well as our middle mile and last mile capabilities to support our fast, improving delivery offers for customers.”

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