Disney began its announced job cuts on September 29. Several hundred employees are affected, according to available information.

Which areas are hit

The focus is on technology and human resources functions. Disney Entertainment Television and the motion picture studio are explicitly not affected.
The parks are not named either. That is the key point for our readers: the cuts target corporate functions, not park operations.

The warning was public

It had been signalled in an internal memo on September 18. In it, Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer Horacio Gutierrez wrote of hard choices on staffing and of automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies.
His own department, Legal and Global Affairs with around 1,000 employees, would be much smaller than it is today.

The third round this year

This does not stand alone. Two earlier waves came in 2026:
  • Over 1,000 positions were cut in April.
  • Several hundred followed in July at Pixar, ESPN and National Geographic.
At the end of fiscal 2025, Disney employed 231,000 people.

The link to the technology strategy

The timing coincides with an appointment: on October 2, Karandeep Anand becomes the company's first Chief Technology Officer, previously chief executive of the AI provider Character.AI. His appointment was announced on the same day the internal memo went out.
Disney has drawn no causal connection, and we do not assert one. The memo itself, however, names workflow automation as the reason for the smaller organisation.

What is open

Disney has not published an exact figure. The several hundred count comes from reporting, not a company statement. Whether further rounds follow is also unknown.