Facebook parent Meta to cut another 10,000 jobs

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said on Tuesday it plans to lay off about 10,000 workers, or about 13% of its workforce, the latest move in what the company’s founder Mark Zuckerberg called “a year.” s efficiency. “

The layoffs will affect the hiring team this week, and a reshuffle of its technology and business units will take place in April and May, Mr. Zuckerberg said. said in the memo Published on the company website. The new announcement is the company’s second round of layoffs in the past six months. Last November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 people, about 13% of its workforce at the time.

Meta also plans to close about 5,000 unfilled recruiting positions, Mr. Zuckerberg said in the memo. Other restructuring efforts include planning to complete an analysis of Meta’s hybrid reopening model, which began testing last March, this summer.

“It’s going to be tough, there’s no way around this,” he wrote.

After years of hiring at breakneck pace, Mr. Zuckerberg is laying off staff. His company has hired heavily as its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp, has become popular around the world. The coronavirus pandemic has also boosted the use of mobile apps, leading to more growth. At its peak last year, Meta had 87,000 full-time employees.

But as the global economy deteriorated last year and the digital advertising market shrank, Mr Zuckerberg began to wind down unchecked growth. Meta cut employee perks. The layoffs last November mostly affected business units and the recruiting team, and Mr Zuckerberg hinted at further layoffs.

On an earnings call in February, the CEO said he didn’t want the company to be overstaffed with middle managers, or “managers managing managers.” He said he was responsible for last year’s layoffs, blaming his enthusiasm for a surge in usage early in the pandemic.

Meta is tackling many challenges these days. It has to contend not only with a digital advertising slowdown, but also with Apple’s privacy changes to its mobile operating system, which limit Meta’s ability to collect iPhone user data to help target ads. It also faces stiff competition from TikTok, which has soared in popularity over the past few years.

Meta is also in the tricky process of transforming into a “metaverse” company, connecting people to immersive digital worlds through virtual reality headsets and apps. Mr. Zuckerberg sees the Metaverse as a next-generation computing platform, so Meta has been pouring billions of dollars and reallocating staff into its Reality Labs division, which is focused on products from the Metaverse.

However, it’s unclear whether people will want to use Metaverse products. In recent months, the public has turned to artificial intelligence-based chatbots. Meta has been investing in AI for years, but hasn’t been at the center of conversations about the technology lately.

In Tuesday’s announcement, Zuckerberg laid out a new vision to streamline the company’s organization, including eliminating layers of management, ending lower-priority projects and rebalancing product teams to focus on engineering. He added that the moves were in response to global conditions, including increased regulation, geopolitical instability, rising interest rates and a cooling economy.

“The world economy has changed, competitive pressures have increased, and our growth has slowed considerably,” he said. “We should prepare for the possibility that this new economic reality will persist for many years.”

Gregory Schmidt Contribution report.