Another major layoff has hit the tech industry. Twitch is reported to layoff of around 35% of its staff, around 500 workers anonymous sources told Bloomberg. Twitch had seen similarly large layoff in March 2023, when it was revealed that the company laid off around 400 of its workers.
This comes after a number of tumultuous events occured at the company in the past few months. Such events included Twitch ending support in South Korea and some of its top executives leaving their positions.
Despite being one of the few popular livestream platforms on the Internet, Twitch has cost Amazon a significant amount of money to maintain its infrastructure despite being a company of such a large magnitude.
This high cost had seen a shift in focus within Twitch’s leadership, pushing towards improving the websites advertising content to help supplement the rising maintenance costs. Unfortunately, with how the site has struggled to balance them, this lead to the necessary decision of the company leaving South Korea to tamper down on costs.
While an official reason for these new layoffs have not been given, it’s highly likely similar to Twitch’s reasoning for leaving South Korea and its previous layoffs in early 2023.
The company’s CEO Dan Clancy had remarked that those layoffs were simply a byproduct of the economic environment at the time, as well as slow revenue growth. For Clancy, those unfortunate layoffs were needed in order for Twitch to be run “sustainably.”
Layoffs within the tech industry show no sign of slowing down despite entering into the new year. Twitch joins others like Unity, which recently announced the layoffs of a sizable portion of its workforce, around 1,800 employees on Monday.
Twitch has yet to confirm the layoffs, but more likely than not, they may be revealed as early as later this week.