Netflix Cuts Nearly 1,000 Jobs as It Fights Social Media for Your Eyeballs

Netflix is cutting roughly 1,000 jobs, about 6% of its workforce, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The cuts hit hardest in product, tech, legal, and human resources, according to Netflix, which framed the move as a reallocation rather than a retreat, saying it will keep investing in "high impact areas" and remains on track to hit its full-year financial targets.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the layoffs, citing an internal memo sent to staff. In that memo, co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters reportedly wrote: "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 had 16,000 full-time employees at the end of last year, per its annual regulatory filing, which puts the scale of these cuts in context: a meaningful but not company-reshaping trim, aimed at specific back-office and support functions rather than content or programming teams.

The timing matters. The layoffs land just months after Netflix lost a drawn-out bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery's streaming and studio operations, a prize that eventually went to Paramount Skydance. That deal would have handed Netflix not just HBO and a deep studio library, but games, additional streaming infrastructure, and cable networks like CNN and HGTV. Losing it left Netflix without a shortcut to the kind of scale and library depth that rivals like Paramount Skydance and Disney are now consolidating.

So instead of growing by acquisition, Netflix appears to be tightening operations while it leans harder into a different kind of competition, one that isn't really about streaming services at all anymore.

The real competitor isn't another streamer

For most of the last decade, Netflix's rivals were other subscription services: Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV+. That fight hasn't gone away, but it's increasingly been overshadowed by a bigger problem: Netflix is losing ground in the much broader battle for how people spend their screen time, period.

According to various market research firms cited in reporting on the layoffs, TikTok's user engagement is closing in on Netflix's. More strikingly, YouTube is said to have overtaken Netflix in average daily viewing time during 2025. That's a notable shift. YouTube was long dismissed by traditional media as a repository of amateur clips and creator content, not a serious rival to prestige television. It's now out-watching the company that redefined what television even means.

TikTok and Instagram pose a different kind of threat than Hulu ever did. They're not competing on content quality or exclusive titles, they're competing on sheer attention-capturing design, serving up an endless, algorithmically tuned feed that doesn't require a 45-minute commitment the way a Netflix drama does. Netflix has to fight for minutes in a world where the most dangerous competitor might be a phone's home screen, not a rival app's new hit show.

How Netflix is responding

Netflix's playbook for defending its position has broadened well beyond making more shows. The company has been raising subscription prices and pushing its ad-supported tier, which brought in more than $1.5 billion in ad revenue in 2025, as a way to extract more value from existing subscribers even as growth slows elsewhere. It has poured money into live events and sports programming, areas where TikTok and YouTube have less of a foothold, along with gaming, and children's programming aimed at locking in younger viewers early.

More tellingly, Netflix has started borrowing directly from the social platforms it's competing against. The company has experimented with short-form video content, redesigned its mobile app with an eye toward the kind of scrollable, feed-like browsing that TikTok popularized, and invested in AI-supported features and video podcasts. None of this would have seemed necessary for Netflix a few years ago, when its biggest challenge was simply making better shows than Disney+ or HBO. Now the challenge is making people choose a two-hour film over fifteen minutes of algorithmic shorts.

Financially, Netflix isn't struggling. The company reported $45.2 billion in revenue in 2025, and said it's on pace to meet its full-year forecast despite the layoffs. That's an important distinction: this isn't a company in crisis trimming costs to survive, it's a company reallocating resources toward the fronts where it thinks the real fight is happening.

That framing, "disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources," as the co-CEOs put it in their memo, suggests Netflix sees its organization as better suited to a streaming-versus-streaming world than to the attention economy it's now competing in. Cutting staff in legal, HR, and parts of product and tech reads less like austerity and more like Netflix clearing room, organizationally and financially, to keep funding the live sports, gaming, ad tech, and short-form experiments it's betting will keep subscribers from drifting over to TikTok or YouTube in their free time.

Netflix spent years training audiences to binge. Its next challenge is convincing them to stop scrolling long enough to do it.