The most recent round of layoffs at Amazon has hit Twitch, the company’s popular live-streaming subsidiary, and Amazon Games hard, leaving thousands of workers unsure about their future. Reports say that Amazon is cutting more than 14,000 corporate jobs as part of a huge restructuring drive led by CEO Andy Jassy. Jassy has stressed the need of using artificial intelligence (AI) to cut expenses.
Twitch Workers Are Among the Most Affected
Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million in August 2014, and reports say that the layoffs have had a big effect on the company. People from many areas, such as trust and safety, customer experience, and fraud prevention, have lost their employment.
One of the most well-known people to speak out after the layoffs is Tarfu, an X (previously Twitter) user and Twitch veteran of 11 years. He wrote a series of emotive tweets about his experience.
“I began my career in trust and safety, then moved on to customer experience.” Tarfu said, “I was the one who made the whole fraud program at Twitch.” “I was the one who kept terrible people off Twitch who steal and misuse the platform’s money. I guess I did a good job because they fired me.
Tarfu said that the timing of his layoff couldn’t have been worse because he was still healing from a motorcycle accident and getting married in less than a month.
“Bad timing since my motorcycle accident was a month ago and I’m getting married in less than a month.” He wrote, “This has been a bad year.”
“I never got credit for the work I did.”
In later posts, Tarfu said he was upset that he wasn’t getting any acknowledgment and that the layoffs were impersonal.
“I worked for a corporation for 11 years and never got any credit for the work I accomplished. I had death threats and my personal information was made public. “They fired me by email and didn’t even have the decency to call,” he wrote.
He also said that he might go back to streaming, remembering that he was a Twitch Partner for 14 years.
“Maybe I can start streaming again.” I joined the Twitch community because I thought I could make it better. I think I helped creators make “real” money and kept bots off the site.
The other Twitch workers respond online.
Other Twitch workers have also used social media to talk about their jobs and look for new ones.
JDubb, an employee who had worked at Twitch for nine years, acknowledged his layoff on X:
“Today, as part of the Amazon layoffs, my tenure at @Twitch has come to an end after 9 amazing years. This is the best job I’ve ever had. I’ve learned so much, met wonderful creators and coworkers, and looked forward to TwitchCon every year. I have updated my resume and am open to new jobs.
At the same time, another Twitch employee who wasn’t affected asked the online community to be understanding of those who lost their jobs:
“4th layoffs at Twitch.” The employee commented, “I’m not affected, but I want to ask people to be nice to those who have to deal with this unstable job market.” “The social media world makes it look like all the hard work people do to keep the Twitch you love in balance is bad.”
The Cloud and Games Divisions of Amazon were also affected.
A Bloomberg story says that Amazon’s layoffs will also affect its cloud computing and video game operations. The cuts are expected to be mostly in the company’s main publishing operation and locations in Irvine and San Diego.
Steve Boom, Amazon’s Vice President of Audio, Twitch, and Games, acknowledged in an internal email that the business had decided to stop most of its first-party AAA game development, including massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, since it needed to redirect its resources.
Boom commented, “We are proud of what we have done in first-party AAA game development and publishing, but we have made the hard choice to stop a lot of our first-party work.” “This includes cutting back on roles in our Irvine and San Diego studios, as well as in our central publishing team.”
Amazon is restructuring, and layoffs are a part of that.
Amazon is laying off a lot of people, which is one of the biggest layoffs the company has ever done. The company is doing this to make its operations more efficient and move money to AI and automation technology. The decision is in line with what is happening in the tech industry as a whole, where big corporations are cutting back on traditional jobs and putting a lot of money into AI innovation.
Twitch still has problems with making money, paying streamers, and competing with other platforms, even if it laid off some workers. Experts in the field say that the most recent cuts could affect the stability of the platform and the trust of the community in the coming months.
In short, here are the main points:
Amazon’s cutbacks will effect 14,000 corporate employment around the world.
Several senior Twitch employees were let go, making it one of the hardest-hit companies.
Tarfu, a Twitch employee for a long time, talked about how he felt online.
Amazon Games is cutting back on AAA and MMO projects in San Diego and Irvine.
CEO Andy Jassy is in charge of a bigger restructure that includes layoffs.