Amazon.com Inc. said on Wednesday that it was closing its Halo subsidiary, which sells fitness and sleep monitors, as the internet giant began a larger company-wide hiring freeze.
The business announced that it would discontinue supporting Halo services as of July 31 and will completely compensate customers who purchased Halo devices during the previous twelve months.
The business said in a blog post that it has “notified impacted employees in the U.S. and Canada today.”
In 2020, the business released the first Halo band, a fitness tracker that also included a subscription to certain Amazon health monitoring and analytic services. Later, a contactless sleep tracker and smart alarm clock named Halo View and Halo Rise were introduced.
Similar to its competitors Apple Inc. and Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., Amazon has invested in consumer health-tracking technologies, at times receiving regulatory attention for the sensitive data it sought to gather, such as body fat percentage through its fitness bracelet.
As part of its second round of layoffs, which it announced in March, Amazon began contacting some of the impacted employees on Wednesday.
Employees impacted by the layoffs received emails from the heads of Amazon Web Services and the People Experience and Technology division, the business said.
