Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has announced it will cut an additional 10,000 jobs and leave 5,000 vacancies open.
The news comes four months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed it was preparing to cut 11,000 jobs, affecting 13% of the global workforce.
In a statement on his Facebook page and Meta’s news blogZuckerberg said members of the company’s recruiting teams will know if they’ve been affected by March 15, with restructuring and layoffs within Meta’s technology groups expected in April, then corporate groups in late May.
However, he added that in a small number of cases it could take until the end of the year for these changes to take effect, while timelines for international teams will also look different.
Zuckerberg has called these changes Meta’s “Year of Efficiency,” and in addition to laying off more than 20,000 employees and pausing recruiting, the CEO also said in his note to employees that the company will “flatten our organization by removing multiple layers.” to delete”. of management.”
Commenting on the current macroeconomic environment, Zuckerberg said the company needs to prepare for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years to come.
“Higher interest rates lead to a leaner economy, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and more regulation leads to slower growth and higher innovation costs,” he said. “Given this outlook, we will need to work more efficiently than our previous headcount reductions to ensure success.”
Loss-making metaverse remains a priority
The news comes six weeks after Meta posted its message financial results fourth quarter 2022in which the company’s Reality Labs division reported an operating loss of $13.72 billion for all of 2022. Despite Zuckerberg saying today that the company would proactively cut “projects that are underperforming or may no longer be as critical,” the Reality Labs , which is responsible for developing the metaverse and hardware products such as Quest headsets and AR glasses, expects an even bigger loss in 2023.
“Our biggest investment is advancing AI and building it into all of our products,” said Zuckerberg. “We have the infrastructure to do this on an unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it enables will be amazing. Our leadership work to build the metaverse and shape the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to shaping the future of social connectedness.”
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today Meta said the expected impact of these layoffs and other cost-cutting measures, including restructuring costs, will be approximately $3 billion to $5 billion, covering facility consolidation costs, severance payments and other employee costs.
After a wave of layoffs in the technology sector last year, the trend will continue into 2023, with technology giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, SAP and Salesforce announcing job cuts. Reasons cited for job cuts include geopolitical instability, rising interest rates and the need to cut staff as growth slows due to pandemic-fueled hiring, as demand for cloud and remote access to business services increased enormously.
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