The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter, that the layoffs might be announced as early as Wednesday.

Meta declined to comment on the report.

The Facebook parent forecasted in October a weak holiday quarter and significantly more costs next year, wiping about US$67 billion off its stock market value, which added to the more than half a trillion dollars in value already lost this year.

The disappointing outlook comes as Meta is contending with slowing global economic growth, competition from TikTok, privacy changes from Apple, concerns about massive spending on the metaverse and the ever-present threat of regulation.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said he expects the metaverse investments to take about a decade to bear fruit. In the meantime, he has had to freeze hiring, shutter projects and reorganize teams to trim costs.

"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 organization than we are today," Zuckerberg said at the last earnings call in late October.

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