The roughly 6 percent reduction, the largest since 2022, hits product, tech, legal and HR, while the content budget stays untouched.
Netflix is cutting roughly 1,000 jobs, about 6 percent of its workforce, and the most telling detail is not the number. It is where the cuts are landing. In a memo to staff on Wednesday, co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said the greatest impact would fall on the company’s product, tech, legal and HR teams, not on the programming side that fills the service. Netflix, in other words, is trimming the machine while protecting the content, one week before it reports third-quarter earnings.
The Biggest Cuts Since 2022
This is the largest staff reduction at Netflix since 2022, when the company let go of hundreds of employees in back-to-back rounds after reporting its first subscriber loss in a decade. The difference this time is that the business is not shrinking. Sarandos and Peters wrote that Netflix is “strong and growing” and on track to hit its full-year forecast, which makes this a reset rather than a retreat.
A 6 percent cut that totals about 1,000 people puts Netflix’s workforce at roughly 16,500 to 17,000 employees, a small staff by the standards of the legacy studios it now outspends.
The Growth Problem
The pressure is easier to see in what Sarandos said publicly two weeks ago. Speaking at Bloomberg’s Screentime summit on Sept. 30, he admitted the company is not growing as fast as he wants. Netflix still posts big profits and remains the largest subscription streamer in the world, but viewing time has flattened in recent months, and that matters more now than ever. Advertising is one of Netflix’s main growth engines, and ad revenue depends on engagement, not just sign-ups.
That is the logic behind the memo’s promise to keep investing “aggressively” in high-impact areas while making focused choices elsewhere. The company did not say what those areas are, but cutting product and tech staff while pledging more innovation suggests Netflix expects to get more out of fewer engineers, a bet much of the tech industry is making right now.
A Very Different Rival Landscape
The timing is notable for another reason. Netflix’s biggest competitor just got bigger. With Skydance now combining Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery and planning to merge HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single app, the streaming market is consolidating fast, and even the smaller services in that empire are being judged on efficiency. Netflix is clearly trying to run leaner before that combined rival is fully assembled.
For subscribers, nothing changes immediately. Netflix’s fall slate, including Ben Affleck’s Animals, is already on the service, and the content budget appears untouched. The real test comes next week, when Netflix reports earnings and is expected to explain how these cuts fit its plan to grow engagement and advertising in 2027.
