Massive job cuts at Twitch, employees left in limbo

Twitch announced that it had made the difficult decision to reduce the size of its workforce, laying off over 400 employees.

Twitch co-founder and CEO Emmett Shear recently announced that he is leaving his duties because he wants to spend more time with his newborn son. Dan Clancy was appointed as the new CEO after Shear's departure. Clancy announced the layoffs in the first blog post he published as the new CEO of Twitch.

Just over 400 employees have been affected by this decision, and the company says that the decision was made to ensure it protects the business in order for Twitch to be around for a long time.

"Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainably, we've made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce," says Clancy.

Clancy also said they are confident in their "big" opportunities to support streamers and grow Twitch.

Tech giants continue to reduce workforce

Big tech firms like Twitter, Google, and Meta announced similar but significantly larger layoffs than Twitch. It is not a mystery that the technology industry, even the top firms, is currently having hard times. While these companies tried to solve their problems by cutting off the workforce, Apple decided to slow down the hiring process and give fewer bonuses and promotions to existing employees.

On the other hand, Twitch is owned by Amazon, which is expected to reduce its workforce by an additional 9,000 individuals. It was known that this reduction would impact employees in various roles in AWS, Twitch, advertising, and human resources. Today, Clancy said just over 400 employees are laid off, which means around 8,600 Amazon employees' jobs are still in danger.

CEO Andy Jassy said that Amazon's businesses have "added a significant amount of headcount over the past several years. But the "uncertainty" of the current and future economy means Amazon has "chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount."

Twitch layoffs are just the start for Amazon employees. In the next few weeks, almost 8,600 more people will be laid off, following the elimination of 18,000 jobs in January. Apart from Amazon, Meta laid off more than 21,000 employees, Microsoft laid off 10,000 people in January, and Google cut 12,000 employees a couple of days after Microsoft.

Advertisement