Twitch Lays Off 500 Employees in Amazon’s Downsizing Initiative for 2024

Photo Credit: Twitch

Amazon announced a series of layoffs impacting Prime Video, but its gaming division Twitch is also impacted. The streamer is cutting 500 people from their roles—an estimated one-third of staff.Twitch CEO Dan Clancy announced the layoffs this morning, with 500 people estimated to be around 35% of Twitch staff. Bloomberg reported the platform was considering reducing staff on Tuesday, with the company confirming the cuts in a lengthy post on its website.

“I wanted to send a short note to let you know that we’ve made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our workforce today,” the note to the Twitch community begins. “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.” Dan Clancy shared the internal memo sent to Twitch staffers announcing the layoffs.

“We still have work to do to rightsize our company and I regret having to share that we are taking the painful step to reduce our headcount by just over 500 people across Twitch,” the announcement reads. “This will be a very hard day. Our service exists to empower communities to create, together, and every single one of you has played a vital role in fostering our community and furthering that mission.”

“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 three or more years—not where we are today.”“As with many other companies in the tech space, we are no sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future.”

Streaming giants struggled to right themselves after advertising spend tanked in 2023. Spotify went through three rounds of job cuts in 2023 alone as it restructured its podcast division and cut shows that remained vastly unprofitable gambles, like Megan Markle’s podcast ‘Archetypes.’