Twitch lays off employees via Google Meet video calls
Severance is a minimum of four weeks
Today is another special edition1 of this newsletter.
Twitch employees were pulled into meetings today to be laid off.
Clancy emailed staff on Thursday evening that “if your role was eliminated,” employees will be pulled into Google Meet calls on Friday morning and afternoon, according to a copy of the email viewed by this newsletter.
“This way of doing layoffs has been pretty traumatic, as the public knows it was announced Monday and internally we had no guidelines or information on what was happening,” a current employee said on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on the record. The employee waited until Friday morning to find out if their job was safe, and said their mental health had taken a toll even though they were still employed.
Another employee who was laid off said that Twitch’s approach was “super bungled.” Speaking on the condition of anonymity as they did not want to risk their severance, they said they “spent the entire week in fear and stressed because of how this was managed.”
Employees who were about to be laid off received a calendar invite or a Slack message from a manager about 15 to 30 minutes before the meeting. Their access to most Twitch systems will be cut off but they’ll still have access to their emails for now, according to Clancy’s email.
On Monday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced 9,000 layoffs in addition to the 18,000 that were previously confirmed. As part of those 9,000 layoffs, Twitch’s new CEO Dan Clancy said on the same day that he would cut 400 jobs, about 15% of the live-streaming platform.2
Clancy said that “user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations” and the workforce would have to be cut to “run the business sustainably.”
The layoffs were spread across the company, including marketing, customer support, Responsible AI, a team that produced original content for Twitch, trust and safety, and more. Seniority also didn’t seem to matter.
“I’m absolutely shocked at who has been let go,” said former Twitch director of creator development Marcus ‘DJWheat’ Graham. “People with eight to ten years of tenure who I would argue represented the heart and soul of the ‘Bleed Purple’ era of Twitch. So many talented individuals across so many critical teams. Twitch will survive, but it will do so without the heart and soul who built it.”
The mood across the company’s general Slack channel was somber, as people said goodbyes and commiserated.
Jimmy Whisenhunt, a director on the Twitch Music team who worked with creators, wrote on LinkedIn that after nearly eight years, he was being laid off. Whisenhunt wrote that he would “need a little break to process” and that it would be “tough to find a new gig” that would keep him as engaged. Another employee wrote that he was on a H-1B work visa and would be looking for more work in order to stay in the country.
“Twitch was a company that saw growth from being in the right place at the right time,” said an employee who was impacted by the layoffs, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “StarCraft 2, Fortnite, the pandemic, each of these things drove massive growth but they weren’t really caused by any actions Twitch took. There were plenty of efforts to try and leverage those things, hold onto that growth and then increase the goals for the future because we were now a bigger company, but ultimately, our growth and eventual shrinkage were almost entirely led by outside factors.”
The employee added, “My main regret is hiring people onto my team who have now also been let go, and hoping they don't regret trusting me and joining me.”
Employees in the United States will get a minimum of four weeks of severance, with one week of base salary for every six months of service, up to a maximum of twenty weeks of paid severance, according to several employees who were laid off.
Devin Nash, whose agency, Novo, has helped brands cut ad deals with Twitch and YouTube, said, “Layoffs were super needed at Twitch. It’s been bloated a long time.”
He added that, “I feel like tech has a lot of ‘surplus elites’ that benefited from the last ten years and didn’t really do much at their jobs.”
Twitch did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Another employee whose job was eliminated said, “Some truly phenomenal people were let go and I really can’t see any rhyme or reason behind some of these decisions, so at least I know I’m in good company.”
For additional reading on Twitch’s company culture, my former Washington Post colleague Nathan Grayson just published this story yesterday. It’s one of Launcher’s final stories and you can read it here for free.
As for next time…
I’ve been at GDC this week, collecting exclusive interviews and news. Haven’t had a chance to catch my breath but you can expect more updates soon.
It’s a rush edition to get the news out. So no bonus links and side stories.
Strange disclosure time: Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which is laying me off by March 31.