Netflix is laying off about 6% of its staff, close to 1,000 people, in its biggest round of job cuts since 2022, The Wall Street Journal reports. The report cites an internal memo to employees from co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters.
The company later confirmed the cuts to TechCrunch, and says most of them fall on its product, tech, legal and human resources teams. That reaches well past the back office, into the teams that build the service you stream on.
Sarandos and Peters call Netflix’s mission to entertain the world ambitious, and write that “delivering on it requires us to be disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources,” according to the Journal. (Read: fewer people.)
Netflix told TechCrunch it will “continue to invest aggressively in high impact areas” to improve its service, and that it is on track to deliver its full-year forecast. It had 16,000 full-time employees at the end of 2025, according to its annual filing.
The cuts follow a long bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery’s studios and streaming business, which Netflix lost to Paramount Skydance earlier this year.
YouTube, TikTok and Instagram now compete with Netflix for the hours people spend watching. The streamer has answered with price increases, a bigger ad-supported plan, live events and sports, games, video podcasts, short-form video and a redesigned mobile app.
The take
We’d judge this round by the app, not the memo. Netflix is thinning the teams that build its product in the same year it’s trying to out-engage YouTube, which only works if fewer people can ship faster. It made $45.2 billion (about Php 2.8 trillion) in revenue in 2025, more than $1.5 billion (about Php 94 billion) of it from ads. Whether the job cuts really push them more toward their company-wide goals, well, it could be anyone’s guess.
