Disney has started its third round of layoffs in 2026. The latest cuts affect a couple hundred employees and are focused largely on technology and human-resources roles.
The current round is smaller than the company’s two earlier reductions this year. Disney Entertainment Television and the motion-picture studio are not included in these cuts.
Which Disney jobs are being cut?
Technology and HR make up much of the affected group. The layoffs follow a voluntary early-retirement offer made to director-level and more senior employees who were at least 50 years old and had worked at Disney for ten years or longer.
Disney has not published a full list of teams or locations. “A couple hundred” describes the scale reported across the company, not one single department.
How does this compare with Disney’s earlier 2026 layoffs?
Disney cut about 1,000 jobs in April. Another several hundred roles were eliminated in July, with Pixar, National Geographic, and ESPN among the businesses affected. The September action brings the company to three separate layoff rounds in one year.
The targets have shifted between rounds. April reached a broad group of corporate and entertainment jobs, July landed heavily on several media brands, and September is centered on internal technology and HR. The reductions now reach across the company instead of staying inside one studio or network.
The company ended its 2025 fiscal year with about 231,000 employees: 172,000 in the United States and 59,000 in other countries. Around 16% were part-time workers and 8% were seasonal.
Those totals show the size of Disney, but they do not make the cuts abstract for the people losing jobs. Three rounds in six months also make it harder for employees to know when the restructuring has actually ended.
Are these cuts tied to Disney’s AI plans?
There is no public evidence connecting this specific layoff round to generative AI. A separate memo in Disney’s legal and global-affairs operation discussed automation and possible future reductions, but that group is not part of the current technology-and-HR action.
The two stories are separate. Disney is cutting jobs now, and it is also studying how automation may change other work. The company has not said that AI caused these September layoffs.
Disney’s next earnings update may give investors a clearer picture of the savings behind the restructuring. Employees will be looking for a simpler answer first: whether a third round is finally the last one this year.
