Spectrum, which is owned by Charter Communications, has decided to make another significant workforce change as it continues to battle mounting customer losses in its cable TV and internet business.
Charter revealed in its latest earnings report that Spectrum lost 120,000 internet customers and 60,000 cable TV customers in the first quarter of this year. Amid these losses, the company’s revenue dipped by 1% year over year.
The decline in customers comes after Spectrum increased the monthly prices of its TV Select packages by $5 and several older internet plans by $2 in July last year. On social media platform Reddit, customers have also flagged what they see as stealthy price hikes for Spectrum’s internet service this year.
“The operating environment for new sales, in particular internet, continues to be competitive,” Charter Chief Financial Officer Jessica Fischer said during an earnings call in April.
She also said Charter is betting on its $34.5 billion acquisition of Cox Communications, which received approval from the Federal Communications Commission in February, to help repair its business.
The acquisition will enable Charter to invest billions of dollars in upgrading and expanding Spectrum’s network nationwide.
Spectrum suffers another round of layoffs
As Charter works to reverse Spectrum’s customer losses, it continues to cut jobs, with its latest round affecting hundreds of employees.
In a WARN notice filed on July 8, Charter announced its decision to “discontinue the operation of its network operations center” in Town and Country, Missouri, resulting in the layoff of 107 Spectrum employees.
According to a recent report from Fox 2, the center is a regional office for Spectrum’s business, finance and corporate support teams. Also, Spectrum clarified to the news outlet that the office building is not closing entirely, as teams not affected by the layoffs will continue working at that location.
The layoffs will officially take place on Sept. 8 and will primarily affect employees and managers in network engineering operations.
To lessen the blow of the job cuts, Spectrum is outsourcing back-office roles to manage remote network monitoring. It will also offer laid-off employees a comparable role in the St. Louis area for at least the next eight months.
Related: Spectrum suffers heavy loss as customers ditch service
The latest round of layoffs comes after Spectrum closed its call center facility in Appleton, Wisconsin, in March, which resulted in 313 employees losing their jobs.
Back in October, Spectrum also reportedly laid off 1,200 workers, reducing its workforce by about 1%. Corporate employees and those who work in back-office functions across the country were impacted by this move.
Spectrum’s recent layoffs come as Charter is aggressively investing in artificial intelligence to reduce its $8 billion in annual operational service costs.
In November, it even entered a partnership with Amazon Web Services to deploy AI across its business to transform operations and software development capabilities.
Charter CEO Christopher Winfrey said during the earnings call in April that the company’s new AI tools are so far yielding positive results across its business.
“We have deployed new AI tools, now used by our service agents, driving higher customer satisfaction and reducing call times with higher job satisfaction for our employees as well,” said Winfrey.
Spectrum faces another round of job cuts, affecting 107 employees.jetcityimage / Getty Images
Spectrum’s layoffs reflect a broader telecom workforce shift
Spectrum isn’t the only telecommunications company that has cut jobs this year.
T-Mobile quietly conducted layoffs in January, March, and April, impacting workers in several departments such as consumer and retail, sales, end-user support, and product.
Verizon also eliminated hundreds of jobs nationwide in May, impacting less than 1% of its global workforce, according to a Business Insider report.
In June, AT&T employees took to social media platform Reddit to reveal that the company had also quietly axed jobs across multiple departments.
In June, the tech industry announced 15,503 job cuts, the most of any sector. So far in 2026, the tech industry has announced 139,156 layoffs, up 83% from the 76,214 cuts announced in the sector through June 2025.
“Tech remains the epicenter of this year’s cuts,” said Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in a press release. “AI is the dominant force as companies are restructuring around it, automating roles, and reallocating budgets toward new capabilities. The sector is being reshaped in real time.”
In the telecom sector specifically, 2,269 layoffs have been announced so far this year.
In a report from Mobile Europe in May, Matt Walker, chief analyst at MTN Consulting, said that as global telecom revenues remain flat, the industry’s top companies are “shifting from unrealistic growth targets to aggressive cost control” and using AI as an excuse to cut jobs.
He warned that this move comes with several consequences.
“Indiscriminate cuts can erode morale, institutional knowledge, service quality, and brand equity, hurting long-term profitability,” said Walker. “Telcos that rush to cut staff in response to AI may also create talent gaps that increase cybersecurity risk, churn, and lost innovation.”
Related: Comcast launches new service to win back internet customers
