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Facebook parent Meta layoffs to come this week: Report
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter, that the layoffs might be announced as early as Wednesday.
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eta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week that will affect thousands of employees, the latest in a string of major staff reductions that have shaken Silicon Valley.
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.
The report about the layoff plan came as no surprise amid the downturn for US tech companies this year. Twitter’s new chief Elon Musk fired half of the company’s 7,500 employees right after he completed the company’s takeover for $44 billion.
Payments firm Stripe and rideshare company Lyft, two darlings of Silicon Valley, announced major layoffs on Thursday as well.
Stripe, a payments company based in San Francisco and Dublin, said it was going to slash 14 percent of its staff, telling its employees it had "overhired for the world we're in".
Microsoft and Snap have cut jobs and scaled back hiring in recent months as global economic growth slows due to higher interest rates, rising inflation and an energy crisis in Europe.
The tough economic times are also hitting Amazon, which announced that it would freeze new corporate hires amid a highly uncertain economic environment.
Meta had in June cut plans to hire engineers by at least 30 percent, with Zuckerberg warning employees to brace for an economic downturn.
The Wall Street Journal reported in September that Meta was planning to cut expenses by at least 10 percent in the coming months, in part through staff reductions. Meta reported more than 87,000 employees at the end of September.
Company officials already told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week, the sources said. The planned layoffs would be the first broad head-count reductions to occur in the company’s 18-year history. The number of Meta employees expected to lose their jobs could be the largest to date at a major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech-industry retrenchment.
Meta shareholder Altimeter Capital Management, in an open letter to Zuckerberg, had previously said the company needed to streamline by cutting jobs and capital expenditure, adding that Meta had lost investor confidence as it ramped up spending and pivoted to the metaverse.
