About 1,000 people at Netflix are finding out their jobs are gone. The company is laying off about 6% of its workforce, its biggest round of Netflix layoffs since 2022, and the cuts land mostly on the product, tech, legal and HR teams.
Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters broke the news in a memo to staff on Wednesday morning, according to The Hollywood Reporter. TheWrap says The Wall Street Journal reported it first. Netflix has not published the memo itself, and it declined to comment beyond it. The company insists the business itself is healthy.
What the Netflix layoffs actually mean
Netflix is trimming about one in every 17 employees. The company had about 16,000 full-time staff at the end of 2025, according to TheWrap, so 6% works out to roughly 1,000 people. CNBC’s report says “nearly 1,000,” so treat the number as a round one.
The memo is calm and confident in tone. “Our business is strong and growing, and we remain on track to deliver our full year forecast,” Sarandos and Peters wrote, as quoted by CBR. In the same note, they said the company has to be “disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources,” per CNBC.
In plain terms, the cuts are not about a company in trouble. They are about a company deciding where its money goes next, and about the people who were not part of that plan.
Why the 2022 Netflix layoff round keeps coming up
Reporters keep comparing this to 2022, and for good reason. That year Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in a decade and let go of a few hundred people across two rounds. Those cuts were about 150 in May and about 300 in June, per Variety’s 2022 coverage.
This new Netflix layoff round is larger in raw numbers. Deadline notes Netflix had made no significant cuts since then, apart from a few dozen product jobs in February. Some headlines call this the biggest cut to date. The safer wording is the biggest since 2022.
The growth problem behind the cuts
So why cut now? A few weeks ago, Sarandos told the Bloomberg Screentime conference, “Overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster.”
Netflix is still the biggest subscription streamer, and its profits are solid. But as CNBC reports, viewing time has stagnated in recent months. The password-sharing crackdown and the cheaper ad tier did much of the work in adding subscribers. Those one-time boosts do not repeat. That slowdown helps explain this Netflix workforce reduction.
The company has been adding live sports and video podcasts to hold attention, per NBC News. It also lost the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming and studio assets to Paramount Skydance earlier this year, according to GV Wire. You can read how Paramount and Skydance outbid Netflix for those assets in our earlier coverage.
Meanwhile, Disney announced about 300 job cuts on Sept. 29, mostly in HR and technology. Media companies are all tightening at once.
What the Netflix job cuts mean for everyone else
Here’s the thing: if you are a subscriber, nothing changes today. Your login still works, and the shows are still there. The cuts hit corporate and support teams, not the content library.
But there is a signal in who got cut. These Netflix job cuts trim the back office while the company tells the world it will keep investing in its priority areas. That usually means more bets on sports, live events and ad revenue, and fewer people supporting everything else. For the roughly 1,000 workers affected, and the families who depend on those paychecks, that is a hard shift to absorb.
Shares rose about 1% after the news, per Capital Brief. That is the market’s reaction. For the people losing their jobs, the day looks very different.
What to watch after the Netflix layoffs
The next checkpoint arrives Tuesday, Oct. 20, when Netflix reports third-quarter earnings after the market closes, per TipRanks. Look for any restructuring charge, the new headcount and whether that full-year forecast holds.
Details such as severance and how the cuts split between the U.S. and the rest of the world have not been reported yet. Netflix says the business is strong. In six days, the numbers will show whether that holds, and the people affected will be hoping for answers on what comes next.
