Inside an Amazon Prime Now delivery hub in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

Amazon added 100,000 new warehouse workers over the past month to help fulfill the surge in orders by customers sheltering at home. Amazon announced the newly filled positions Monday and said the company is now hiring an additional 75,000 employees.

Before the coronavirus hit, Amazon’s headcount was already growing exponentially. The company revealed it had 798,000 workers around the world in January. The new hires will bring Amazon’s headcount to nearly 1 million, a staggering size in ordinary times and a particularly astounding figure as so many other companies around the world are cutting staff.

Amazon is struggling to keep up with demand spikes from customers confined to their homes under shutdown orders around the world. The company said Sunday that it won’t accept new customers for its Amazon Fresh grocery delivery service and will place them on a waitlist. Amazon is reserving some shopping hours at its Whole Foods grocery stores so that online delivery orders can be fulfilled.

The fulfillment centers that power Amazon’s e-commerce business are similarly inundated. Amazon temporarily stopped accepting shipments of non-essential items to its warehouses so household goods and medical supplies could be restocked.

High demand is not the only challenge Amazon faces during this crisis. The company is taking heat for a growing number of COVID-19 cases inside its warehouses. Politicians and labor activists are criticizing Amazon and calling for broader safety measures. Amazon says it has implemented 150 new process changes and is taking extreme steps to protect employees.

Amazon is also attempting to build an internal lab to test employees for the virus, rather than waiting for government testing to scale up. In a post on the company’s Day One blog, Amazon said that short of a vaccine right now, regular testing would make a huge difference in fighting the virus. “Those who test positive could be quarantined and cared for, and everyone who tests negative could re-enter the economy with confidence,” Amazon said.

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