Roku has announced it will lay off 200 U.S. employees, or about 7 percent of its workforce. according to Variety. According to the company’s statement, the cuts are intended to reduce “staff costs” by about 5 percent as it seeks to spend less on operations in light of “current economic conditions” in the advertising and streaming industries.
In some ways, the move isn’t necessarily surprising — several of Roku’s peers, such as Disney, Netflix, and Meta, have also announced layoffs in recent weeks and months.
However, cutting 200 jobs is a much harder change than the company predicted just over two weeks ago has released its third quarter earnings report. The shareholder letter does draw attention to the fact that the workforce has grown tremendously since 2021 because Roku’s leadership “believed the economy stemmed from pandemic disruptions,” but the proposed remedy was more toward slowing hiring rather than of firing.
Clearly, those efforts weren’t enough to save Roku workers from the spate of layoffs that have hit the tech industry at large. Companies like Amazon, Lyft, Twitter and more have announced mass layoffs in the past month alone.
