Netflix laid off about 1,000 employees, close to 6% of its workforce, in a round announced in a memo to staff and reported by The Wall Street Journal. Cord Cutters News reported the total, which ran above the 5%, or roughly 850 jobs, the streamer had been expected to cut. Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters told employees where the deepest reductions would land. Product, technology, legal and human resources teams would absorb them.
Both executives cast the move as a spending decision. "Our business is strong and growing, and we remain on track to deliver our full year forecast," they wrote, adding that Netflix would keep investing in high impact areas.
Back in 2022, about 450 employees were let go in the last major round, after a first quarter in which Netflix lost roughly 200,000 subscribers following a January price hike and a crackdown on password sharing.
Nothing comparable has happened this time.
User engagement rose 2% in the first half of the year, the slow growth that Cord Cutters News identified as the expected trigger for the cuts.
Cutting 6% of staff while telling employees the full-year forecast is intact is a reallocation of cost, not a response to falling revenue, and the memo points the reductions at back-office functions while naming no cut to programming spend.
Yet the departures include four series executives: Lisa Lang McMullen, director of overall deals and series; James Oh, director of drama series; and Carolina Garcia and Andrew McQuinn, both directors of original series, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Some content-side oversight is going with them.
The Q3 earnings call on October 20 will be the first hard test of that framing. If engagement growth stays near 2%, the savings will read as margin protection ahead of a forecast management has already reaffirmed. Severance charges will land in the quarter being reported. The memo gave no estimate of what the cuts save, and Netflix has not said how much of the full-year plan depended on the headcount being removed. What the call will show is whether a company confident enough to reaffirm guidance needed to shed 1,000 jobs to get there, or whether the growth rate forced its hand.