More than 400 employees will be laid off from Twitch as a result of the "current macroeconomic environment." The layoffs are part of a workforce reduction at Twitch's parent company, Amazon, which announced today that it will cut approximately 9,000 jobs in the coming weeks.

"As a company focused on building communities together, this decision was incredibly difficult and not made without considerable thought," Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said in a statement (opens in new tab). [Like many companies, our business has been affected by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. We have made the very difficult decision to reduce the size of our workforce in order to sustainably operate our business."

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy provided a bit more background on the headcount reduction in his statement (opens in new tab), saying that Amazon's business has "added a significant number of people" over the past several years. However, current and future economic "uncertainties" mean that Amazon has "chosen to further rationalize costs and headcount."

This is Amazon's second major layoff, following 18,000 in January (open in new tab). Facebook's parent company, Meta (open in new tab), laid off more than 21,000 employees in two rounds of layoffs, Microsoft (open in new tab) laid off 10,000 employees in January, and Google (open in new tab) laid off 12,000 employees a few days after Microsoft's layoffs (opens in new tab) laid off 12,000 employees a few days after the Microsoft layoffs.

"Slimming down," a term also used by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week, is bad news for the thousands of people who lost their jobs, but good news for shareholders: Jassy said, "I remain very optimistic about the future, and I am confident that our biggest businesses, Store and AWS, and the myriad of opportunities we have, both in the new customer experience and business we are investing in."

Clancy, CEO of Twitch, echoed similar sentiments in his own statement. He said, "Millions of streamers choose Twitch every day to build and engage with our community. I and the rest of the leadership team are confident that we have a tremendous opportunity to support you and grow Twitch." Our sole focus has always been to inspire, grow, and retain streamers around the world, and that will never change."

The timing of this announcement will no doubt raise some eyebrows: Krans was just named CEO of Twitch last week following the resignation of co-founder Emmett Shear (opens in new tab). Shear, who continues to work in an "advisory role" at Twitch said he wants to spend more time with his family, which is appropriate after more than 16 years at the top, but one wonders if the timing is completely coincidental, or if the then-impending cutbacks, of which Shear was surely aware, played some role in his decision. It would be natural to wonder.

Jassy said that the Amazon layoffs would take place "in the coming weeks."