Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch announced Wednesday that it would cut approximately 500 employees from its global workforce. The layoffs represent around 35% of the company’s global workforce. The announcement was made in a blog post from Twitch CEO Daniel Clancy, but news of impending layoffs at the company was initially revealed via a Bloomberg report on Tuesday from reporter Cecilia D’Anastasio.
Bloomberg is also reporting that hundreds of employees are being laid off at Amazon Prime today.
In the blog post, Clancy attempted to explain the company’s reasoning behind this large number of layoffs:
I know many of you are wondering why this is happening. Over the last year, we’ve been working to build a more sustainable business so that Twitch will be here for the long run and throughout the year we have cut costs and made many decisions to be more efficient. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business. Last year we paid out over $1 billion to streamers. So while the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today. As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future.
He also expressed disappointment that news of the layoffs was leaked prior to Wednesday’s announcement:
I also want to acknowledge how disappointed I was yesterday that this information leaked. I am sorry for all of the anxiety that it caused over the last several hours. Our hope was that you all would hear from us this morning and very quickly understand how this impacted your role and we were unfortunately not able to accelerate the timeline, which I know is very frustrating.
The last time Twitch made such dramatic cuts to its workforce was in the March of 2023, where it laid off around 400 employees.
Clancy’s entire blog post can be found here.