Read the email Twitch's CEO sent employees at 6am announcing 500 job cuts
Twitch employees woke up on Wednesday morning to some bad news: layoffs.
CEO Dan Clancy emailed the company announcing 500 job cuts.
Amazon bought the live-streaming video game platform in 2014 for close to $1 billion, but things aren't so rosy there now.
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In an email to employees, Clancy said that even with cost cuts and growing efficiency, the platform “is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business".
He wrote: “For some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today."
First indication of trouble came last month, when Twitch - based in San Francisco - said that it was withdrawing from the South Korean market due to expensive network fees.
“As you all know, we have worked hard over the last year to run our business as sustainably as possible," Clancy wrote in the email. “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.”
The restructuring was based on conservative growth predictions, Clancy said, while stressing the business remained strong after paying streamers more than $1 billion (£780,000,000) last year.
Twitch streamers like Ninja and Auronplay have huge followings, and occasionally celebrities - including politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and rapper Snoop Dogg - pop up on the site.
Employees who have lost their job will be receiving more information about their severance packages and hold 1:1 meetings in the next few days.
After a hiring surge during the pandemic, Amazon is now cutting thousands of jobs.
Last March, the tech giant announced it planner to lay off 9,000 employees - that's on top of the 18,000 jobs it said it was cutting in January 2023.
And job cuts are happening elsewhere in the company this week - including layoffs across the Prime Video and MGM Studios unit.