Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is planning for mass layoffs this week. The projected layoffs would be the first significant cutbacks in headcount in the company’s 18-year existence. The parent firm of Facebook and Instagram claimed over 87,000 workers.
Following the big layoffs at Twitter, it is now the turn of another Big Tech business, with the Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta apparently planning to lay off ‘thousands’ of staff this week.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the “large-scale” job layoffs, which will begin on Wednesday, might impact “thousands” of staff.
“Social-media company’s planned cuts expected to affect many thousands of its workforce. The planned layoffs would be the first broad head-count reductions to occur in the company’s 18-year history,” the article stated late Sunday, citing sources.
The parent firm of Facebook and Instagram claimed over 87,000 workers (as of September).
The business refused to comment, citing Zuckerberg’s previous declaration that the company will “focus our efforts on a limited handful of high priority development areas.”
In June, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox issued a “serious times” warning to staff, stressing that they must “perform perfectly in an environment of slower growth.”
“In 2023, we’re going to concentrate our efforts on a limited handful of high-priority development areas,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s earnings call last month.
“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organisation than we are today,” he said.
In Q3, Meta reported another quarterly revenue fall as investors started to lose trust in its billion-dollar-losing metaverse plan. Meta’s sales fell 4% year on year in the third quarter (Q3) to $27.7 billion. This drop was caused by Meta’s massive losses in Reality Labs, Meta’s virtual reality branch, which lost $3.672 billion in the third quarter.
Metaverse investors have urged the corporation to cut its employment by at least 20% and cease investing in the metaverse.
