By Thousands of workers at Facebook parent firm Meta Platforms Inc. may be let go in the week beginning Monday.
The layoffs are described as “large-scale”, and the newspaper cites sources saying that Meta’s might be the biggest of any tech business in recent memory. Towards the end of September, Meta had over 87,000 staff members. Beginning on Monday, everything except emergency business trips must be cancelled.
These cutbacks are on top of the widespread layoffs that have hit the technology sector in recent months, including those at Twitter, Snap, Microsoft, and others. On Sunday, a representative for Meta refused to comment and referred FOX Business to what CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg had to say about the company’s performance during its third-quarter results call in October.
“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” Zuckerberg said. “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 organization than we are today.”
Zuckerberg’s statement during the company’s earnings call last month.
Why Meta is Laying Off
As a result of the economic downturn, Meta expects to cut its personnel over the next year, a move that Zuckerberg initially suggested in Meta’s July financial report. Zuckerberg remarked, “This is an era that needs greater focus, and I want us to get more done with fewer resources.” Zuckerberg imposed a recruiting moratorium in September, citing his expectation of a smaller Meta workforce in 2023.
According to the publication, the corporation plans to lay off “many thousands” of workers, and the news might come as soon as Wednesday. At the moment, Facebook employs about 87,000 people. There is a chance that the layoffs may be the biggest in tech firm history, much larger than the ones Twitter announced on Friday. These layoffs would also be the first major company-wide change in its history.
Mark Zuckerberg’s wager on the Metaverse has cost the corporation money without bringing in any new income. It has spent $15 billion since the beginning of 2021 to popularize VR/AR, but to no avail. The projected loss for 2023 is significantly higher than the current loss.
The parent company said at the end of September 2022 that it employed over 87,000 people worldwide. The number of people affected seems to be bigger than the up to 3,700 people Twitter plans to lay off, but the proportion of the workforce affected appears to be less than Twitter’s this week. The disappointing report comes after its quarterly reports showed that its Reality Labs division—which includes the company’s Virtual Reality (VR), Extended Reality (XR), and Metaverse endeavours—experienced operating losses of $3.7 billion. The $9.4 billion in losses incurred by Reality Labs this year are much more than the $6.9 billion recorded during the same time in 2021.
Within the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic, It expanded dramatically, hiring over 27,000 new workers in 2020 and 2021. The first nine months of 2022 saw the corporation continue its recruiting drive, increasing its headcount by 15,344. Company fortunes have shifted in recent months, even though it benefited greatly from the outbreak. The corporation announced the first-ever decline in sales in July.
Meta has not said how many people they plan to let go, although it’s likely to be in the thousands. It’s improbable that Meta would do what Twitter Inc.’s new owner Elon Musk did on Friday and fire half of the company’s employees. Yet, due to Meta’s far greater personnel, a 5% decrease there would result in more layoffs than at Twitter.
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