Amazon’s Twitch to cut 500 employees, or 35% of staff, as soon as January 10 as business remains unprofitable
- The cuts come after Twitch’s chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer left in the final months of 2023
- Running a large-scale website supporting 1.8 billion hours of live video content a month is enormously expensive, company executives have said
Amazon.com’s live-streaming site Twitch is poised to cut 35 per cent of its staff, or about 500 workers, according to people familiar with the plans, the latest in a series of job reductions there.
The cuts, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, come amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives left the company in the span of a few months. A Twitch representative declined to comment.
Running a large-scale website supporting 1.8 billion hours of live video content a month is enormously expensive, despite Twitch’s reliance on Amazon’s infrastructure, company executives have said.
In December, Twitch chief executive Dan Clancy said the company would cease operations in South Korea, where the costs are “prohibitively expensive”, according to a blog post he wrote.
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Twitch has increased its focus on advertising in recent years. Nine years after Amazon’s acquisition of the company, the business remains unprofitable, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
