Netflix (NFLX) Cuts 1,000 Jobs, 6% of Staff, Six Days Before Earnings

1,000 Roles Cut Across Four Departments

Netflix is cutting roughly 1,000 jobs, about 6% of its workforce, in the largest layoff round the company has conducted since 2022. Co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos delivered the news by email on Wednesday morning. The reductions fall on the product, technology, legal and human resources groups, the departments that build the service, keep it compliant and manage the workforce itself. In an internal memo, the two executives wrote that delivering on the company’s commitments requires it to be “disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources.” The company did not disclose severance costs, the regional split of the cuts or how many of the affected roles are based in the United States.

The timing gives the move its market weight. It lands six days before Netflix reports quarterly earnings on October 20, and the stock has already lost about 41% of its value over the past twelve months. Shares traded around $71 early on Wednesday. A 6% cut removes roughly one in every sixteen employees. Reductions on this scale are rare for the streamer: the 2022 round, the last comparable one, was smaller and arrived in two separate waves. The last time the company cut anywhere near this deep, the reductions followed a share-price bottom within days, a sequence traders have not forgotten.

The framing matters as much as the headcount. Nothing in the memo or the email presents the cuts as a response to financial distress; the stated reason is discipline over where people and resources are prioritized, which reads as reallocation inside product and technology rather than retrenchment. The market will test that reading on October 20, when Netflix must show that engagement and margins are holding while payroll shrinks.

31.5% Margin, a Slowing Audience

Dismissals at a profitable company invite an obvious question, and the company’s own filings answer part of it. Netflix’s second-quarter shareholder letter projects 2026 revenue of $51 billion to $51.4 billion, with the company keeping 31.5 cents of every sales dollar as operating profit, a 31.5% margin. That letter went out with the quarter’s results and sets the full-year frame in which the cuts are being judged. The margin figure is the operating share of revenue, the portion left after the costs of running the service. Money is not the problem; attention is. Members watched only 2% more hours in the first half of 2026 than a year earlier. Nielsen measurement data sharpens the competitive picture: YouTube took 14.2% of US television viewing in July, against 7.8% for Netflix. US television viewing is the metric advertisers price, which is why that gap matters more than any single quarter’s subscriber count.

The 2022 episode now runs through every trading desk that follows the name. The stock closed at a split-adjusted $16.64 on May 11, 2022, its low of that year, and the layoffs of that round came within days of that bottom: about 150 roles on May 17, roughly 300 more on June 23. By the end of 2022 the shares had climbed 77% from that low. Analysts credit most of that recovery to the cheaper ad-supported plan and the crackdown on password sharing rather than to the cuts themselves, a caution against reading the 2022 bottom as a layoff effect.

The immediate test is the October 20 report. Netflix has guided to third-quarter revenue of $12.86 billion and earnings of $0.82 per share, the profit attributed to each share of stock, figures issued before the layoffs were announced. Six days from now, the market will learn whether the cuts were a pre-earnings reset or the start of a longer squeeze on a company whose audience growth has flattened.

Against that backdrop, COINOTAG data shows the stock changing hands at $69.94, down 1.63% on the day, after a session range of $69.49 to $71.39. The composite scoring rates the resistance at $71.98 as the strongest level overhead, at 100/100, marked by a Fibonacci retracement cluster and a Supertrend signal; the strongest support below sits at $67.83, scored 64/100. Positioning on Netflix stock perpetuals stays modest, with open interest near $6.9 million and a positive funding rate of 0.0041% per interval. The daily RSI reads 42.3 and the trend is sideways, which leaves the October 20 report to decide whether $71.98 or $67.83 gives way first.