By Matthew Tabe
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has laid off 11,000 of its employees today.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the company, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced the mass layoffs in a message to employees, which Meta shared on its Newsroom.
“Today, I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go,” Zuckerberg said.
“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. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted,” he wrote.
Recall that the company in October forecast a weak holiday quarter and significantly higher costs next year, wiping $67 billion off Meta’s stock market value, adding to the loss of more than half a trillion dollars this year.
Meta’s profits for the third quarter declined by 52 percent, as compared to the same period a year ago. Over the past year, the company’s market value has declined to $600 billion.
Meta’s latest report detailed that as of September 30, it had approximately 87,000 employees worldwide that work across its various platforms, which consist of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Zuckerberg in June warned employees that the coming recession would lead to a reduction in engineering jobs by at least 30 percent at the social media company.
“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 organisation than we are today,” Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call in late October.
Earlier this month, Meta’s shareholder, Altimeter Capital Management, wrote to Mark Zuckerberg that Meta needs to streamline by reducing jobs and capital expenditures, adding that it ramped up spending and pivoted to the metaverse as Meta has lost investor confidence.
Now with this announcement, Meta has joined the list of major Silicon Valley companies including Microsoft Corp, Twitter Inc, and Snap Inc who have announced job cuts recently due to rising interest rates, rising inflation, and the European energy crisis which have caused the global economy to slow down.
Over 3,000 Twitter staff members were dismissed last Thursday, according to messages obtained from some of the workers.
Some staff members said they were locked out of their company’s Slack and email accounts, late Thursday, the evening before mass layoffs were due to be announced.
Twitter emailed staff Thursday, saying layoffs would be announced at 9 a.m. PST on Friday, and that all the company’s offices were being “temporarily closed.”
The layoffs affected employees around the world, from the US, to the UK, and to Singapore. About 3,700 people were selected to be laid off — around 50% of Twitter’s workforce, a medium, Insider, previously reported.
