Disney Cuts Hundreds of Tech and HR Jobs in Third Layoff Round of 2026 Under CEO Josh D'Amaro

The Walt Disney Company has laid off several hundred employees — most of them in human resources and information technology — in the company's third round of job cuts this year under chief executive Josh D'Amaro.

The reductions, carried out on Tuesday, September 29, were first reported by the entertainment trade publication Deadline and subsequently confirmed by Variety, Reuters and Fox Business. Reports differ slightly on the exact figure — Deadline cites "a couple of hundred" while CNBC puts the number at about 300 — but all agree the cuts fall primarily on corporate HR and tech teams.

Disney's film and television operations were largely untouched. Disney Entertainment Television and the motion picture studio were mostly spared, according to TheWrap and Yahoo Finance, and the latest round is the lightest of the three waves so far in 2026.

The cuts follow an April round that eliminated roughly 1,000 roles — the largest of the year — after D'Amaro consolidated Disney's marketing operations under chief marketing and brand officer Asad Ayaz. That round hit whole publicity teams and roughly 8% of Marvel Entertainment's workforce. A second wave in July removed several hundred more positions across corporate functions, ESPN and the studios, with Pixar and National Geographic hit hardest.

The layoffs were foreshadowed by an internal September 18 memo from chief legal and global affairs officer Horacio Gutierrez, obtained by Deadline, which warned of "hard choices" about "staffing investments" and said the division would become "a much smaller organization." Gutierrez pointed to a "transformation process" that includes "automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies" — widely read as a reference to artificial intelligence.

D'Amaro, who succeeded Bob Iger as CEO in March 2026, and chief financial officer Hugh Johnston signalled the cuts in an August 5 letter to shareholders alongside June-quarter results, saying Disney was "mid-stream in this work" to reduce labour and selling, general and administrative expenses. Chief people officer Sonia Coleman said in August that involuntary reductions would continue into next year, after the company offered early-retirement packages to director-level executives aged 50 or older with a decade or more of service.

Disney employed more than 231,000 people at the end of fiscal 2025 — about 172,000 in the United States and 59,000 internationally. The company has not issued a public statement on the latest cuts, according to the reports seen so far.

The layoffs underscore the pressures facing the entertainment giant: artificial intelligence, falling box-office revenue and intense streaming competition. D'Amaro has pushed to build what he has described as a more "agile and technologically-enabled" workforce — and the latest cuts suggest the transformation is only accelerating.