Although word had already started to mount after a report by Bloomberg, Twitch has now officially confirmed that it’s laid off more than 500 employees globally, or around 35% of its total workforce. It comes after 400 employees were also laid off in March last year.
The company’s CEO Dan Clancy, who entered the role during the last round of layoffs, addressed both the Twitch community as well as its internal employees in a post that was published to the official Twitch blog, telling the community, “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. 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. We greatly value the employees we’re saying goodbye to today as people and professionals and are grateful for all their efforts to support all of you. I’m sharing a copy of the email that I sent out to the company this morning to provide more context on the decision.”
In the internal memo to Twitch staff, Clancy said, “Today I have some incredibly difficult news to share. As you all know, we have worked hard over the last year to run our business as sustainably as possible. Unfortunately, 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. 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. ”
The message continues to say that Twitch as an organisation is “larger than it needs to be given the size of our business” and that “we are now sizing our organisation based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future” while noting the fact that the company paid $1 billion USD out to streamers in the past year (somewhat glossing over the fact that Twitch also makes a rather large cut when streamers generate revenue).
Employees affected were informed separately and given next steps, which unfortunately also involves a number of Australian employees who were well-respected within the Aussie streaming community.
You can read Twitch’s statement in full here.
