Dang! Meta Announces The Company Is Laying Off More Than 11,000 Employees
Socialites, get into this: Facebook parent Meta is laying off 11,000 people, about 13% of its workforce. The company announced the big move in a letter sent to workers Wednesday morning.
“Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the letter. “I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”
“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” he continued. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.” So what will happen to the impacted employees? According to Reuters, Meta will commit to paying 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, as well as all remaining paid time off, as a part of the severance package, the company said.
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How Did It Get To This?
In a statement, Zuckerberg explained:
“At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.
He continued,
“In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient. We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high-priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse. We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go.”
To note, Meta had 87,314 employees as of the end of September.
The mass layoffs which is the first in Meta’s 18-year history come right on the hills of job cuts at other major tech companies including Microsoft Corp and Twitter which is now owner by Elon Musk,
What Other Changes Will The Company Be Making?
“I view layoffs as a last resort, so we decided to rein in other sources of cost before letting teammates go,” Zuckerberg explained. “Overall, this will add up to a meaningful cultural shift in how we operate. For example, as we shrink our real estate footprint, we’re transitioning to desk sharing for people who already spend most of their time outside the office. We’ll roll out more cost-cutting changes like this in the coming months.”
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