Twitch lets ‘more than 25’ staff go in round of redundancies

Streaming platform Twitch has now confirmed a round of layoffs, news of which originally hit social media at the tail end of last week.

Twitch has issued a statement to confirm the redundancies, with a Twitch spokesperson saying: "Coming off the record-setting numbers shared in our 2017 Retrospective, Twitch is continuing to grow and advance with success stories from Overwatch League to Fortnite’s milestone-setting streams," a Twitch spokesperson said. "In order to maintain this momentum, we have an aggressive growth strategy for 2018 with plans to increase our headcount by approximately 30 per cent. While we’ve conducted team adjustments in some departments, our focus is on prioritizing areas most important for the community."

Rod ‘Slasher’ Breslau tweeted to say that according to his sources more than 25 people were laid off from Twitch Studios and its community and marketing team as Twitch sought to readjust their headcount after ‘overhiring’.

Some Twitch employees were fired by new Twitch VP of Content Michael Aragon who wasn't even in the office and did this via a remote Google Hangouts call. Employees were told to leave immediately. Morale is at an all-time low at Twitch, with one saying "We got amazon'd. Sad day."

— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) March 30, 2018

1,200 work at Twitch, according to a tweet from Twitch’s former head of Content Marketing who was affected in the layoffs. 30 per cent of 1,200 would be an additional 360 employees, which is a substantial chunk of new stuff.