Netflix is eliminating close to 1,000 jobs, roughly 6% of its staff, and most of them sit in its product, technology, legal and human resources teams. Co-chief executives Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos broke the news to employees in a memo on Wednesday, October 14.
“Decisions like these are never easy, and we don’t take them lightly,” the two wrote. The rest of the memo reads less like a retreat than a reshuffle: the company, they said, has to be “disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources” while it keeps putting money into “high impact areas to improve our service.” Netflix added that it still expects to meet its full-year forecast, and it declined to say anything beyond the memo.
“Our mission—to entertain the world—is ambitious, and delivering on it requires us to be disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources.”
How this round compares with 2022
The last time Netflix let staff go in numbers was the spring of 2022, when it had just reported losing subscribers for the first time in ten years. Those cuts came in two waves. About 150 people, mostly in the US, left in May. Around 300 more followed in June, spread across the US, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Netflix then employed roughly 11,000 people worldwide.
Putting the two episodes side by side, with our working shown:
- 2022: about 450 jobs (150 plus 300) out of roughly 11,000, which works out to about 4.1% of the workforce.
- 2026: close to 1,000 jobs out of about 16,000 full-time employees at the end of 2025, according to the company’s annual filing, or about 6.25%, which Netflix rounds to 6%.
- Scale: 1,000 divided by 450 is about 2.2, so this single round is more than twice the size of both 2022 rounds combined.
The headcount grew by about 5,000, or roughly 45%, between those two moments. Even after this cut, Netflix would have around 15,000 full-time staff, still well above where it stood before the 2022 layoffs began.
The reasoning has also changed. In 2022 a spokesperson said the company was trimming so its costs would grow “in line with our slower revenue growth.” This time revenue is rising. In the second quarter Netflix earned $3.4 billion on revenue of $12.56 billion, up 9% and 13% respectively on a year earlier, and full-year 2025 revenue reached $45.2 billion, with advertising contributing more than $1.5 billion. The soft spot is the outlook: its own forecast for the third quarter came in below what Wall Street analysts had expected.
A crowded field and a lost bid
The cuts land a week after Paramount closed its $81 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, which puts HBO Max and Paramount+ under one owner with a stated plan to fold them into a single service over time. Netflix had agreed late last year to buy Warner’s studio and streaming business, then walked away from that offer in February.
The other pressure is attention. Market research firms report that short-video apps such as TikTok are closing the engagement gap with Netflix, and YouTube is said to have overtaken it in average daily viewing in 2025. Sarandos acknowledged the strain at a public event earlier this autumn: “Overall, we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster.”
What subscribers should expect
For people who simply watch Netflix, the most telling detail is who is leaving. Product and technology teams build the apps, the recommendation rows, the ad-supported tier and the redesigned mobile experience; content and production groups were not among the four areas the co-CEOs singled out. Nothing in the memo, as quoted, mentions subscription prices or the release schedule.
The company has spent the past few years trying to get more out of each subscriber by raising prices, growing the cheaper plan with ads, and adding live events, sports, games, children’s shows and video podcasts. The memo’s promise to keep investing in the service suggests those bets stay, run by smaller teams.
The next hard numbers arrive on Tuesday, October 20, when Netflix reports third-quarter results and faces its first investor questions since the memo went out.
Further reading
Image: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
