Twitch reportedly set to lay off around 500 employees this week

UPDATE 10/01/24: Twitch has now confirmed it's reducing its workforce.

The news was shared in a new blog post from CEO Dan Clancy, including a copy of the internal email sent to staff. "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," he wrote in the post. "Please know that Twitch remains focused on serving our streamers and ensuring that this is the best place to livestream for many years to come."

The included email confirms just over 500 people will lose their jobs. "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," he said.

As for the reason for the layoffs, Clancy wrote: "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 organisation is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business."

Clancy will additionally be answering questions from the community in a stream on the official Twitch channel on 11th January 1pm PT.

In addition, Twitch will end operations in South Korea at the end of February this year, due to the high cost of operating in the country.

ORIGINAL STORY 09/01/24: Just a day after Unity announced it would be laying off 1,800 employees as part of an ongoing "company reset", it's being reported that live-streaming site Twitch is now poised to cut 35 percent of its workforce - equalling around 500 jobs - later this week.

That's according to Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio, who, citing "people familiar with the plans", reports the cuts could be announced as early as Wednesday.

While Twitch declined to comment on the story when approached by Bloomberg, the publication claims the job cuts come amid continuing struggles for the live-streaming site. According to Bloomberg's sources, Twitch still remains unprofitable nine years after Amazon acquired the company for $970m.

If reports of layoffs at Twitch prove to be accurate, they follow two rounds of job cuts at the company last year. In March, more than 400 employees lost their jobs as part of major layoffs at Amazon, and a further round of cuts - this time focused on Twitch's customer experience team - were reported in October.

Despite being a stellar year for game releases, 2023 was notably blighted by extensive layoffs across a huge number of studios, with the total number of workers affected believed to be around 9,500. Word of significant job cuts at Unity and Twitch just weeks into January make for a troubling start to 2024.