The Walt Disney Company is laying off a few hundred employees across multiple departments, Variety confirmed Tuesday — the third round of job cuts this year under recently appointed CEO Josh D'Amaro.

The cuts fall primarily on Disney's human resources and IT departments, both at the corporate level and within individual divisions, according to a source familiar with the reductions. For HR leaders, the detail is worth pausing on: Disney is trimming the very functions that manage its workforce of roughly 231,000 full- and part-time employees, as reported at the end of its fiscal year in September 2025.

How did Disney get here?

This week's layoffs follow two earlier rounds in 2026, each tied to structural changes rather than a single across-the-board reduction.

• April: Disney eliminated about 1,000 roles, primarily a result of D'Amaro's formation of a consolidated enterprise marketing division under Asad Ayaz, chief marketing and brand officer.
• July: The company cut several hundred jobs across certain corporate functions, including at Pixar, ESPN, Disney Entertainment Television and its studios. Most studio-side layoffs hit Pixar; most television-side cuts landed at National Geographic.
• August: Disney offered early-retirement buyout packages to longtime executives as part of its ongoing cost-cutting push.

Deadline first reported Tuesday's layoffs.

What does the pattern signal for employers?

Three rounds of cuts inside roughly six months, each with a different scope and rationale, point to a continuing restructuring rather than a one-time correction. The April round followed a consolidation decision; the July round targeted specific business units; this round reaches into corporate functions themselves, including HR and IT.

That sequence raises practical questions for people-operations teams at any large employer conducting serial reductions: how to maintain service levels for a 231,000-person workforce while shrinking the HR function itself, and how to sequence voluntary measures such as executive buyouts against involuntary cuts.

Disney has not publicly detailed severance terms or outplacement support for the affected employees, nor has it said whether further rounds are planned beyond the cost-cutting program already underway since spring.

With D'Amaro still in his first year as CEO and cost reduction explicitly framing each decision since April, further consolidation-driven staffing changes at Disney remain a live possibility.