Twitch announced plans to reduce its workforce on Monday, demonstrating that even the seemingly booming streaming site isn’t immune to the reductions that have swept the tech industry in the last six months.
The layoffs will affect 400 employees at the company and were characterized as an effort to improve Twitch’s business outlook in the long term. The reduction is part of Twitch parent company Amazon’s plans to let go of 9,000 workers across divisions including its AWS cloud and advertising units.
“Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations,” new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy wrote. “In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.”
Clancy announced the news on the company’s blog just days after longtime Twitch CEO Emmett Shear said that he would step down from the company to spend time with his family. Clancy moves into the chief executive role from his previous position as president, which saw him already running day-to-day operations at the company.
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— Emmett Shear (@eshear) March 16, 2023
While Twitch is still a platform on the upswing, both in terms of its community and its massive cultural impact, the company likely struggled to match its early pandemic highs — a familiar story we’re seeing play out across the tech industry.
With people stuck at home, hours spent in online spaces soared and hires followed suit. But recent uncertain economic conditions are dragging tech companies’ stratospheric new measures for success back to Earth, in many cases prompting them to scale back and reduce the size of their teams.
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Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is stepping down
