Amazon’s Twitch Lays Off 500 Employees, AWS Not Impacted

Twitch is reportedly laying off 500 employees. However, unlike last year when Amazon unveiled layoffs affecting Twitch and AWS, sources say the cloud company is not affected.

Amazon is laying off about 35 percent of the workforce at its livestreaming video platform company Twitch. Unlike last year when Amazon unveiled layoffs at Twitch and Amazon Web Services at the same time, this new round of layoffs does not impact AWS, sources said.

Amazon declined to comment on the Twitch layoffs, which was first reported by Bloomberg. However, sources did confirm that there are no layoffs at AWS connected to the round of cuts at Twitch.

In March 2023, Amazon confirmed both AWS and Twitch would be impacted by a round of 9,000 layoffs at the IT giant.

[Related: AWS, Microsoft, Google Lead Gartner’s Cloud Services Magic Quadrant]

“I’m writing to share that we intend to eliminate about 9,000 more positions in the next few weeks—mostly in AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in a message to employees in March. “This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term.”

This does not appear to be the case for Amazon’s new layoff round at Twitch, which will reportedly affect about 500 Twitch employees.

Although Twitch and AWS are not necessarily connected, there have been some minor overlaps with Amazon as the parent company. AWS turned to Twitch’s live streaming platform in the past to help AWS partners and customers train their cloud skill sets and build a foundational AWS cloud knowledge to prepare for certification exams.

Twitch also runs on AWS infrastructure.

Amazon acquired Twitch in 2014 for $970 million.

Twitch Layoffs

The 500 employee layoffs at Twitch could be announced as soon as Wednesday, Bloomberg reported.

Amazon’s Twitch supports 1.8 billion hours of live video content per month and is highly popular in the video gaming industry.

Last month, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said his company would stop operations in South Korea due to high costs of running the platform inside the country. In addition, several top Twitch executives including its chief content officer and chief product officer have all left the company in recent months.