Twitch to lay off 500 more employees

Twitch is facing another round of layoffs.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon’s live broadcast platform will lay off 35% of its employees, about 500 employees, and the layoffs will be announced as soon as this week.

Twitch did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

It’s the latest blow to an already troubled company, which laid off hundreds of jobs last year amid leadership changes, rising operating costs and community discontent. Shortly after Twitch co-founder and long-time CEO Emmett Shear handed over the reins to current CEO Dan Clancy, the company laid off 400 employees. Late last year, Amazon laid off another 180 employees, shuttered its Crown Channel, the Amazon-operated Twitch show, and shuttered its Game Growth team that was designed to help game creators market themselves.

Twitch also recently announced plans to shut down its service in South Korea, one of the world’s largest esports markets, because internet charges are “incredibly expensive.” In a blog post announcing the closure, Clancy wrote that the company’s operations in South Korea had been operating at “significant losses” and that there was “no path forward” to operating sustainably.

Despite its popularity — the platform has seen a surge in user numbers since the pandemic lockdowns a few years ago — Twitch has struggled to turn a profit. Its shift to prioritizing advertising revenue has been a point of contention among viewers and streamers but has not come to fruition; Bloomberg reports that the company is still unprofitable nearly a decade after Amazon acquired it. In December, several senior executives left Twitch, including its chief revenue officer.

Twitch faces high operating costs to support such a large scale of live content. In a 2022 blog post, Clancy said each high-volume streamer on Twitch costs the company about $1,000 per month, citing Amazon Web Services’ interactive video rates.

“Providing high-definition, low-latency, always-available, real-time video to nearly every corner of the world is expensive,” Clancy wrote.