Netflix’s troubles are coming back into the open as the company moved to shrink its workforce in response to continued challenges to its business growth.

On Tuesday, Netflix announced that it would be laying off 150 employees in the United States and Canada, a choice driven by “business needs” and one that the company declared was not taken lightly.

"These changes are primarily driven by business needs rather than individual performance, which makes them especially tough as none of us want to say goodbye to such great colleagues," the company said in a statement.

According to Netflix, most of the employees that are being let go are based in the United States. With a workforce of about 11,000 employees, the departures represent less than 2% of the total number of people employed at the company.

News of the departures comes as Netflix continues to navigate a period of turbulence that has followed a decline in both user growth and share value in recent weeks.

In April, Netflix reported that its stock took a pummeling and bled a quarter of its value by the end of the first quarter of 2022. In its attempts to diagnose the reasons for this fall, Netflix executives pointed the finger at a number of culprits including rampant password sharing between users and a drop in users that followed its suspension of services in Russia over the war in Ukraine.

Since then, Netflix has been left to ponder how it can stage a rebound. One possible, if controversial option, has been the introduction of a tiered subscription system that includes advertisements at the lower level subscriptions.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings mused about this option, something already done by rivals like Disney+ and Hulu, but the idea has yet to be formally adopted. At the same time, users have openly fumed over social media at the very idea of ads interrupting their Netflix experience after 15 years of streaming ad-free.

RELATED STORIES
Netflix