Disney has laid off a few hundred employees in its latest push to streamline corporate operations, with human resources and technology workers bearing most of the new cuts.

The layoffs took place Tuesday and represent the company’s fourth round of job reductions this year, a person familiar with the situation confirmed. Employees had been bracing for further cuts after months of restructuring across the entertainment giant.

The latest reductions are part of CEO Josh D’Amaro’s effort to make Disney a leaner company while directing more investment toward areas it considers strategically important. Disney employed approximately 231,000 people worldwide at the end of fiscal 2025, including 172,000 in the United States.

Layoffs Have Reached Multiple Disney Divisions

D’Amaro began making significant workforce changes shortly after taking the top job. About a month into his tenure, Disney eliminated roughly 1,000 positions in April. Those cuts were concentrated largely in the company’s unified marketing organization, studios and television operations, ESPN, and product and technology teams.

Another round followed in July, affecting certain corporate functions as well as Disney Entertainment Television and the film studios. Pixar and Nat Geo experienced the largest number of reductions in that round.

ESPN was also hit by the July cuts. Among the on-air names laid off were Karl Ravech, a longtime SportsCenter anchor and Baseball Tonight host who had been with the channel since 1993, and Ryan Clark, a former NFL player who had worked as an analyst on ESPN’s football coverage for more than a decade.

Most of ESPN’s affected positions, however, were behind the scenes and were connected to the acquisition of the NFL Network earlier this year.

Tuesday’s action extends the restructuring into human resources and tech, adding another few hundred employees to the company’s mounting job losses.

Disney Signals More Cost Reductions

Disney leadership had already made clear that its cost-cutting program was not finished. In an August shareholder letter, D’Amaro and chief financial officer Hugh Johnston described the company as being “mid-stream” in its cost-reduction work and indicated that additional updates would follow.

“We’re highly focused on operating with speed and agility and improving productivity and efficiency across the company so we can invest in accelerating growth,” Disney said in the letter.

The message also pointed to “meaningful reductions to cost, including labor,” placing workforce changes at the center of the broader efficiency drive.

Alongside the layoffs, Disney’s efforts to automate corporate work have become another element of the restructuring. The company is increasingly treating technology as a tool that could reshape how corporate departments are staffed and organized.

On Sept. 18, chief legal and global affairs officer Horacio Gutierrez warned employees that Disney was going through a “transformation process” that would involve “hard choices.” His message came as part of a company-wide workforce redesign associated with the adoption of artificial intelligence and other technologies, although the memo itself did not explicitly mention AI.

Gutierrez was direct about the expected effect on his own division, writing that legal and global affairs “will be a much smaller organization than it is today, and some of you will personally be affected by decisions we make in this process.”

What Happens Next?

Disney has not presented the latest layoffs as the endpoint of its restructuring. The August shareholder letter said the cost-reduction effort remained in progress, while the September message to legal and global affairs employees signaled that additional staffing decisions would be made as the company redesigns corporate functions.

For Disney’s workforce, Tuesday’s cuts therefore add to a year of continuing uncertainty. With management pursuing lower costs, greater efficiency and increased investment in selected growth areas, the company’s streamlining campaign remains active across both its corporate departments and entertainment businesses.