Twitch Confirms Another Round of Layoffs, With Over 500 People Affected, or 35% of Staff
Twitch is about to lay off about 35% of its employees, or more than 500 positions. This latest round of layoffs follows others at the Amazon-owned company. Earlier this week, Unity also reported 1,800 layoffs in a brutal start to the year for the industry.
The latest cuts at Twitch were reported yesterday by Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio, who noted that that there have been several executives at Twitch that departed in late 2023. Last year, there were more than 400 layoffs at Twitch, handled through Amazon’s own series of company reductions. Amazon has cut more than 27,000 jobs across multiple divisions.
CEO Dan Clancy confirmed that there will be layoffs in a new statement posted to the Twitch blog.
“We've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our workforce today. At this point in time, we are focused on communicating with our employees and providing them with clarity on how this impacts each of them,” he said. He also shared the email sent to employees, stating that “it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business”.
Twitch continues to undergo some changes, including the end of service in Korea next month. In the announcement that operations will cease there on February 27th, Clancy stated that the company had tried several methods to reduce their operating costs in the region, but “the cost to operate Twitch in Korea is prohibitively expensive”. Clancy stated that among those costs, network fees were 10 times more expensive than in most other countries.
Throughout all of this, as the Bloomberg report notes, the company remains unprofitable.
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