Amazon shuts down Halo healthcare division, lays off staff by offering hardware refunds

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Amazon today sent a note to Halo customers announcing it is closing its Halo Health division, effective July 31. Included in the announcement are news of layoffs, as well as full refunds on hardware purchased in the past 12 months.

This includes the Amazon Halo View, Halo Band, Halo Rise, and a host of accessories. It’s not an unprecedented move (Google did something similar when it recently shut down Stadia), but it’s a sign of goodwill to customers and a tacit acknowledgment that the hardware won’t be worth much when its associated services shut down. The company will also stop subscription fees and refund prepaid ones.

At Amazon, we think big, experiment, and invest in new ideas like Amazon Halo in our efforts to delight customers, the company notes in a letter to a Halo Member. From the beginning of August all the above products will stop working. Amazon also provided information for recycling hardware and saving scanned images to a phone’s camera roll.

Those affected by the layoffs, on the other hand, don’t seem to have received much warning:

Today, we notified affected employees in the United States and Canada. In other regions, we are following local processes, which may include time for consultation with employee representative bodies and possibly result in longer timescales for communicating with affected employees. For employees who are affected by this decision, we are providing packages that include severance pay, transitional health insurance benefits and external job placement support.

Late last month, the company announced 9,000 layoffs, adding to 18,000 since January. Amazon’s hardware divisions were disproportionately impacted by the first round, with a heavy focus on the Alexa/Echo team.

The original Halo tracker was met with a privacy pushback when it was announced in August 2020. A few months later, we spoke to Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar about the concerns.

I really think there have to be rules in place, he told TechCrunch at the time. The reason I’m writing HHS is because they should play a bigger role in ensuring data privacy when it comes to health, but between HHS and the Federal Trade Commission, they need to come up with some rules to safeguard private health information. And I think Amazon Halo is just the ultimate example of this, but there are many other devices that have the same problems. I think there’s some state regulations going on and stuff like that, and we just need federal standards.

The line still grew rapidly, adding the Halo View, an $80 Fitbit competitor, in late 2021, along with additional fitness and nutrition programs. Last September, it announced Halo Rise, a bedside sleep tracker, which went on sale later this year.

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