SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 9: After Twitter, Meta was set to lay off thousands of employees and the company’s Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told the workforce to be ready for what was coming their way.
According to Wall Street Journal, in his latest meeting with senior executives, Zuckerberg is said to have confirmed “broad cuts” across the company, starting from Wednesday.
Employees who lose their jobs would be provided at least four months of salary as a severance, according to the report.
The mass layoff is the first broad head-count reduction to occur in Meta’s (earlier Facebook) 18-year history.
The Facebook and Instagram parent company reported over 87,000 employees (as of September).
The company declined to comment, referring to Zuckerberg’s recent statement that the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas”.
In June, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox warned employees of “serious times”, saying that the workers must “execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth”.
During the company’s earnings call last month, Zuckerberg said: “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,” he had mentioned.
Meta posted another quarterly revenue decline in Q3 as investors began to lose faith in its loss-making, billion-dollars metaverse dream.
In the third quarter (Q3), Meta’s revenue declined 4 per cent year over year to hit $27.7 billion. This decline was owing to Meta’s huge losses in Reality Labs, Meta’s virtual reality division, which lost $3.672 billion in Q3.