ESPN announced Thurs­day it is lay­ing off about 300 employ­ees and cut­ting about 500 jobs from its glob­al workforce.

The cuts amount to about 10% of the employ­ees at the sports net­work and are due large­ly to the impact of the pan­dem­ic on its busi­ness and the “tremen­dous dis­rup­tion in how fans con­sume sports.”

“In the short term, we enact­ed var­i­ous steps like exec­u­tive and tal­ent salary reduc­tions, fur­loughs and bud­get cuts, and we imple­ment­ed inno­v­a­tive oper­a­tions and pro­duc­tion approach­es, all in an effort to weath­er the COVID storm,” Jim­my Pitaro, ESPN’s chair­man, wrote in an email to employ­ees. “We have, how­ev­er, reached an inflec­tion point.”

In addi­tion to the lay­offs, the com­pa­ny is plan­ning to leave about 200 vacant posi­tions unfilled.

ESPN did not say how many of the job cuts would come at its Bris­tol, Con­necti­cut, cam­pus, but said they would not be con­cen­trat­ed in any one area. On-air tal­ent, the vast major­i­ty hav­ing per­son­al con­tracts, is not expect­ed to be heav­i­ly affect­ed. But some of those con­tracts could be allowed to expire.

The com­pa­ny said it has more than 5,000 employ­ees, includ­ing about 4,000 in Bristol.

The Dis­ney sub­sidiary has recent­ly been mov­ing toward more direct-to-con­sumer offer­ings, includ­ing its ESPN+, a stream­ing ser­vice that has grown to about 8.5 mil­lion subscribers.

Pitaro said the dis­cus­sions on how to repo­si­tion the com­pa­ny in a chang­ing media land­scape pre­date COVID-19, but said the pan­dem­ic had accel­er­at­ed those discussions.

“Plac­ing resources in sup­port of our direct-to-con­sumer busi­ness strat­e­gy, dig­i­tal, and, of course, con­tin­ued inno­v­a­tive tele­vi­sion expe­ri­ences, is more crit­i­cal than ever,” he wrote. “How­ev­er, build­ing a suc­cess­ful future in a chang­ing world means fac­ing hard choic­es. Mak­ing informed deci­sions about how and where we need to go – and, as always, in the most effi­cient way pos­si­ble — is by far the most chal­leng­ing job of any lead­er­ship team.”

The lay­offs come three years after ESPN cut about 250 jobs, includ­ing jour­nal­ists and on-air talent.