Netflix to lay off roughly 1,000 employees, or 6% of workforce

Netflix said on Wednesday it will lay off roughly 6% of its employees, or roughly 1,000 workers, according to a memo obtained by CNBC.

The job cuts will largely impact the product, tech, legal and HR teams.

“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,” Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters wrote in the email to employees. “Our business is strong and growing, and we remain on track to deliver our full year forecast. We’ll continue to invest aggressively in high impact areas to improve our service and further drive growth and innovation.

“Doing that means making focused choices across the business so we can keep delivering for our members, partners, employees, and investors,” the note said.

Netflix said it did not have additional comments beyond the co-CEOs’ memo. The company is due to report quarterly earnings on Oct. 20.

The layoffs come just a few weeks after Sarandos told attendees at the Bloomberg Screentime conference that the company was “not growing as fast as I want.”

Netflix has faced a paradox in recent months. It continues to post solid profits and remains the biggest player in the streaming realm, but its viewing time has stagnated and the main driver of new subscriber acquisitions has been its password-sharing crackdown and the launch of a cheaper, ad-supported tier.

Netflix’s biggest threat has been YouTube, but looming on the horizon is Skydance. The combined entity of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery has plans to integrate the two companies’ streaming platforms, Paramount+ and HBO Max.

Netflix has diversified its content in recent years, expanding into live sports, documentaries and video games in order to compete for share of consumer attention. At the same time, it’s lacked the water-cooler-type hits like “Stranger Things” and “Squid Game” that previously boosted subscriber growth and viewership.

And Netflix is not the only company looking to cut costs in the media space. Last month, Disney said it would lay off around 300 employees, with the majority of cuts coming from human resources and technology roles.

— CNBC’s Julia Boorstin and Stephen Desaulniers contributed to this report.