Whereas expressing his remorse that 500 employees can be laid off, the chief govt of the Amazon-owned live-streaming platform Twitch chided his employees in a memo for leaking the information to the media hours earlier than the official announcement Wednesday.
“I additionally wish to acknowledge how upset I used to be yesterday that this data leaked,” CEO Dan Clancy wrote within the memo revealed in a weblog put up. “I’m sorry for the entire anxiousness that it precipitated over the past a number of hours. Our hope was that you just all would hear from us this morning and really rapidly perceive how this impacted your function and we had been sadly not capable of speed up the timeline, which I do know may be very irritating.”
Bloomberg Information initially reported the layoffs at Twitch on Tuesday evening, stating that the cuts would have an effect on about 35% of the employees. The reductions come at a time when many tech platforms are downsizing their workforce after a surge in hiring through the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Final 12 months we paid out over $1 billion to streamers,” Clancy defined in his be aware to staffers in regards to the San Francisco firm’s choice. “So whereas the Twitch enterprise stays robust, for a while now the group has been sized based mostly upon the place we optimistically count on our enterprise to be in three or extra years, not the place we’re at as we speak.
“As with many different firms within the tech house, we at the moment are sizing our group based mostly upon the present scale of our enterprise and conservative predictions of how we count on to develop sooner or later.”
Clancy mentioned he had hoped that workers at Twitch — finest generally known as the house for widespread online game livestreamers — would study in regards to the layoffs instantly from the corporate Wednesday morning. He famous that follow-up emails can be instantly despatched to the affected workers.
The layoffs observe an earlier spherical of cuts on the firm final March, when it was introduced that 400 employees would lose their jobs.
