Meta should announce a big wave of layoffs very soon. Several thousand positions could be eliminated.
The parent company of Facebook, Meta should announce a large wave of layoffs in the coming days, if we are to believe The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper reports that the company intends to part ways with “several thousand” employees, with an announcement that would occur as early as Wednesday. Meta currently employs over 87,000 people. These layoffs could be the largest carried out by a tech company this year, larger than those operated by Twitter on Friday. They could also represent the first major restructuring in the history of Meta.
Meta declined to comment on the information. A company spokesperson points to a statement by CEO Mark Zuckerberg made during the third quarter financial results presentation: “In 2023, we will focus our investments on a limited number of our highest priority businesses. This means that some teams will grow significantly, while others will stay the same size or shrink over the coming year,” he said. “Ultimately, we expect to end 2023 with around the same or slightly less payroll than today.”
Several thousand positions could be eliminated
As The Journal As stated, Meta experienced significant growth during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, registering more than 27,000 new employees in 2020 and 2021. The hiring fever had continued the first nine months of 2022, a period during which it signed 15,344 additional new employees. Although the company has benefited greatly from the pandemic, everything has changed in recent months. In July, the Menlo Park firm announced its first-ever decrease in revenue. The company then blamed it on fierce competition from TikTok and the implementation of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature.
At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg’s bet on the metaverse has so far proved unsuccessful, unable to create the expected new revenue opportunities, even though it generates very high costs. Since the start of 2021, Meta has spent $15 billion to democratize virtual and augmented realities, with little success so far. The company expects to lose even more money on this project in 2023.
