(San Francisco) Twitch, Amazon’s video game streaming platform, announced Wednesday the layoff of 500 people, which according to several media represents a third of its workforce.
“I regret to have to announce that we are making the painful decision to reduce Twitch’s workforce by just over 500 people,” Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said in a letter sent to employees and published in an article on the company blog.
These job cuts, initially reported by the Bloomberg agency, come as Twitch has suffered an exodus of senior executives, in a context of cost reduction within its parent company Amazon.
“Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still much larger than it needs to be given the size of our business,” Clancy said.
The platform is experiencing difficulties and recently announced that it would cease its activity in South Korea from February, due to excessively high internet network costs.
Twitch, purchased in 2014 by Amazon for approximately $842 million, presents itself as the world’s largest video game streaming platform, with more than 31 million visitors on average per day.
Amazon launched its largest job-cutting campaign last year, expected to reach 27,000 positions across the company.
