Facebook parent Meta is about to start mass layoffs: Report

Late in September, Mark Zuckerberg informed staff that Meta planned to reduce spending and restructure teams.

According to media reports, Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. plans to start broad job cuts on Wednesday as part of a strategy to decrease costs at the social media giant in the wake of dismal profits and a decline in sales.

According to the sources, who declined to be named discussing personal information, employees who will be impacted will be informed starting on Wednesday morning, and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg spoke to executives on Tuesday to prepare them for the cuts. According to the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg claimed responsibility for the company’s “missteps” during the executive call.

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A request for comment was not immediately answered by a Meta spokesman.

Late in September, Zuckerberg gave his team a heads-up that Meta planned to cut costs and reorganise teams. The corporation, which is based in Menlo Park, California and also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, established a recruiting freeze, and the CEO predicted that workforce will be lower in 2023 than it is now.

According to Insider, the corporation, which employed more than 87,000 people as of September 30, is anticipated to lose around 10% of its workforce. The reductions, which are a part of the first significant budget cut since the founding of Facebook in 2004, are due to a sharp decline in digital advertising revenue, a shaky economy on the verge of a recession, and Zuckerberg’s significant investment in the metaverse, a speculative effort in virtual reality.

“This is obviously a different mode than we’re used to operating in,” Zuckerberg said in a Q&A session with employees in September. “For the first 18 years of the company, we basically grew quickly basically every year, and then more recently our revenue has been flat to slightly down for the first time. So we have to adjust.”

The layoffs at Meta come after those at Twitter Inc., which last week eliminated almost 50% of its personnel after selling itself to Elon Musk. Those layoffs were chaotic, and many workers discovered they were no longer employed when their access to Slack or email was suddenly shut off. Musk claimed that the actions were required to stop the social network’s losses. Later, he asked a few sacked employees to come back.

The parent company of the competing app Snapchat, Snap Inc., said in August that it will reduce its personnel by 20%.