Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch is set to lay off approximately 500 employees this week, or 35% of its total workforce, Bloomberg broke in a report on Tuesday.
According to Bloomberg’s Cecilia D’Anastasio, Twitch may announce the layoffs as soon as tomorrow. The news comes just a day after game engine developer Unity announced it’s laying off 25% of its employees in a “company reset,” and follows a year of large scale layoffs across the games and tech sectors that have affected tens of thousands of workers.
Twitch’s parent company laid off 180 workers from Amazon Games in November, a relatively small number compared to the 27,000 employees it cut earlier in 2023. That mass layoff also dramatically impacted Twitch to the tune of 400 employees in March 2023, just after longtime CEO Emmett Shear departed the company after 16 years. The layoffs haven’t been the only sign of trouble for Twitch: the platform just recently decided to pull out of South Korea over high network fees that forced it to operate in the country at a loss.
If the layoffs match Bloomberg’s reporting, they will leave Twitch with approximately 930 employees, or half the workforce it had this time last year.
