Netflix fires 300 employees as it loses subscribers

Netflix has fired 300 employees in a second round of job cuts.

The streaming service removed four per cent of its workforce, predominantly in the US. Last month, Netflix removed 150 jobs, out of 11,000 people who work for the company.

“While we continue to invest significantly in the business, we made these adjustments so that our costs are growing in line with our slower revenue growth,” Netflix said in a statement.

“We are so grateful for everything they have done for Netflix and are working hard to support them through this difficult transition.”

The reductions come after news that Netflix had lost 200,000 subscribers across the world in 2022, and foresaw two million more users quitting the platform in the subsequent three months.

The company blamed this on more competition from services such as Amazon Prime, Comcast’s Peacock, Paramount’s Paramount+ and HBO Max, as well as other streamers, but former employees said that the cuts are focused on its diversity divisions.

“Nearly everyone I see on LinkedIn posting about being laid off worked on diversity, equity, and inclusion across the company,” former Netflix worker Evette Dionne tweeted in May, during the first round of layoffs.

“These are not the only people being laid off, but they comprise too many of the 150 for it to be a coincidence.”

In response, Netflix said that it was “committed to inclusion on-screen, behind the camera and in our workforce,” and the company is “making changes to how we support our publishing efforts, including bringing some of this important work in-house”, The Guardian reported.

Netflix is also working with other companies for advertising partnerships after the announcement that it will be bringing ads to its platform.

The company is reportedly talking with Google, Comcast, and Roku for ad-sales partnerships. These companies declined to comment.

“We are still in the early days of deciding how to launch a lower-priced, ad-supported option and no decisions have been made. So this is all just speculation at this point,” Netflix said in a statement to CNBC.

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