Twitch Lays Off 400 Employees Just Days After Losing Their CEO
As a part of Amazon’s latest round of layoffs, which has slashed 9,000 more jobs across the company – four hundred Twitch employees lost their jobs today.
The whopping 27,000 layoffs company-wide have impacted departments such as HR, AWS, advertising, and as you already know – Twitch. This move also comes just days after Twitch’s long-time CEO, Emmett Shear, stepped down.
In an update posted to their official blog today, Twitch said that they’ve made the “difficult decision to reduce the size of our workforce, which results in us having to say goodbye to just over 400 people”, because they’ve been “impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations”.
There’s about a million different ways to analyze this. You could write it off as a symptom of a larger problem in the esports and gaming industries right now, chalk it up to the broader tech layoffs that have been made across the world, or you could turn your focus towards Twitch’s looming competition which could be resulting in more scrutiny from higher-ups on their business model. Any way you slice it, it fucking sucks that 400 people lost their jobs today, and I hope they find their way back onto their feet soon.
I’m not sure if this is a sign of way more things to come, or if we’re anywhere near the light at the end of the tunnel… But things are looking grim out there in the industry, folks.
