Today Bloomberg published a report saying that Twitch is set to lay off 500 employees, or around 35 percent of its workforce. The article, several Twitch employees have told Aftermath, is how they found out as well. This isn’t the first time.
"People are freaking out and shocked we have to find out again via a news article," a Twitch employee (who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly) told Aftermath. As of this publishing, Twitch had yet to communicate anything about the layoffs to employees internally, according to multiple Twitch employees.
The cuts could happen as soon as Wednesday, according to Bloomberg, and follow a slew of executive departures in recent months. These include chief product officer Tom Verrilli and chief content officer Laura Lee, the latter of whom was only at the company for a year.
This comes after 400 job cuts in March of last year, as well as redundancies stemming from Twitch’s late-2023 announcement that it’s departing Korea entirely due to “prohibitively expensive” cost of operating in the region. Since longtime CEO Emmett Shear departed in March 2023 and Dan Clancy took the helm, Twitch has laid off nearly 1,000 workers in total.
Over the years, the company has struggled to achieve profitability – something Amazon greatly desires from its subsidiaries – and has resorted to aggressive cost cutting to make ends meet. Some of this, like controversial changes to streamer pay, has fallen on creators, but in the past year it has hit employees especially hard. Under Clancy, Twitch has seemed to right a stagnant ship in terms of new, long-requested features and direct communication with streamers, but clearly the company is suffering from a deeper rot.
