Meta Announces Massive Layoff

  • Meta reduced its workforce by 11,000 in November, which was the company’s first major layoff in its 18-year history. The company had 86,482 employees at the end of 2022.
  • Records show that the tech industry has fired roughly 290,000 employees since the year 2022, with about 40% of those terminations occurring this year.
  • Meta has continued to pour billions of dollars into its metaverse ambitions. The company has, however, recorded huge losses in that division.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has announced a massive layoff of 10,000 employees, making it the first tech giant to carry out a second layoff of this sort. The news comes after Meta laid off 11,000 staff in November as it sought to slim down its operations.

The job cuts are allegedly part of a systemic change that will also “flatten” middle management layers, knock off lower-priority projects, and cancel plans to fill 5,000 jobs. The majority of the layoffs, according to Mark Zuckerberg, will be announced in April and May. Zuckerberg, however, noted that some might extend to the end of the year.

Zuckerberg also expressed plans to further cut back the recruiting staff, which suffered a huge hit during the November layoffs. According to the announcement, the restructuring of the IT group will take place in April, while the cuts to business groups will be effected in May.

Zuckerberg wrote in a message to Meta’s staff,

For most of our history, we saw rapid revenue growth year after year and had the resources to invest in many new products. But last year was a humbling wake-up call. I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.

The restructuring at Meta appeared to have begun last week after the company announced that it was looking into “strategic alternatives” for Kustomer, a customer service business it had previously purchased. An internal memo also shows that Meta scrapped its skunkworks New Product Experimentation division and moved team leader Ime Archibong to concentrate on Messenger’s product.

The decision to reduce Meta’s headcount could appease investors who have become concerned with Zuckerberg’s alleged extravagant spending as revenue growth from Meta’s core operations slowed down due to high inflation and a decline in digital advertising from the e-commerce boom of the last three years.

Furthermore, concerns about a global recession brought on by rising interest rates have also triggered a wave of massive job cuts across tech companies in America. Financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, along with tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon, have all announced job cuts in recent months.

Lawrence Woriji
Lawrence Woriji Verified Author

I have covered some exciting stories in my career as a journalist and find blockchain-related stories very intriguing. I believe Web3 will change the world and want everyone to be a part of it.

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