After Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg Confirms Layoffs To Begin At Facebook Parent Meta: Report

Zuckerberg confirmed the development to hundreds of executives at Meta revealing large cuts and held himself accountable for the company’s downturn

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told executives that the company will start the process of laying off on Wednesday morning. Zuckerberg confirmed the development to hundreds of executives at the company revealing large cuts, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The recruiting and business teams as groups would see layoffs, the CEO mentioned to his employees, as per the report. He also noted that an internal announcement of the company’s layoff plans is expected today.

Zuckerberg held himself accountable for the company’s decline owing to over-optimism about growth leading to overstaffing. While Meta’s head of human resources, Lori Goler, stressed that employees who lose their jobs will be offered at least four months of salary as severance.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook along with Instagram and WhatsApp, had more than 87,000 employees by September end. During the company's earnings call in October, Zuckerberg said: "In 2023, we're going to focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas."

"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 had mentioned.

Meta had posted a quarterly revenue decline in Q3 as investors began to lose faith in its loss-making, billion-dollars metaverse dream. In the third quarter (Q3), Meta's revenue declined 4 per cent year over year to hit $27.7 billion. This decline was owing to Meta's huge losses in Reality Labs, Meta's virtual reality division, which lost $3.672 billion in Q3.

The tech industry has been plagued with a slowdown in the past few months after a spike of success since the world moved indoors during the pandemic. Tech companies have been heavily impacted by the global economic downturn, rising interest rates coupled with regulatory struggles forcing companies including Alphabet and Amazon to slow or stop hiring.

The development at Meta comes after the largest micro-blogging social platform laid off nearly 3,700 people last week in an effort to trim costs following Musk’s acquisition, which closed in late October.

In August, Snap sacked around 1,300 staff to reduce investments. Microsoft also trimmed 1,000 employees across several divisions in October, the Guardian cited Axios report.