Facebook parent Meta lays off over 11,000 employees

Following poor profits and a decline in revenue, Facebook’s parent company Meta said on Wednesday that it would be laying off more than 11,000 staff members in an effort to cut costs. The widespread employment losses come after layoffs at other significant tech firms, such as Elon Musk-owned Twitter and Microsoft.

In a blog post published Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “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.”

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“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,” he added.

Employees would receive 16 weeks of base salary as severance, plus an additional two weeks for each year of service. According to the corporation, employees will be reimbursed for healthcare expenses for six months.

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The reductions, which are a part of the first significant budget cut since Facebook’s founding in 2004, are due to a sharp decline in digital advertising revenue, an economy that is teetering on the verge of a recession, and Mark Zuckerberg’s significant investment in the metaverse, a speculative virtual reality initiative.

By focusing resources on “high priority growth areas” including its AI discovery engine, ads, and business platforms, as well as its metaverse project, Zuckerberg emphasised the need to become more capital-efficient.

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The layoffs at Meta come after those at Twitter last week when that business reduced its employees by almost 50% as a result of its sale to Elon Musk. Those layoffs were chaotic, and many workers discovered they were no longer employed when their access to Slack or email was suddenly shut off. Musk claimed that the actions were required to stop the social network’s losses. Later, he asked a few sacked employees to come back.

The parent company of the competing app Snapchat, Snap, said in August that it will reduce its personnel by 20%.