Meta, the parent company of Facebook, could announce massive layoffs as soon as next week. According to The Wall Street Journal. The outlet reports the company is planning to cut “many thousands” of employees, with an announcement coming as soon as Wednesday. Meta currently employs over 87,000 people. This could be the biggest workforce reduction by a tech company in 2018, surpassing layoffs Twitter, Friday. The cuts would also represent the first broad restructuring in Meta’s history.
Meta declined comment. A spokesperson pointed Engadget to a statement CEO Mark Zuckerberg made during the company’s Recent Q3 earnings calls. “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,” he said. “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
As The JournalMeta’s growth was significant during the coronavirus epidemic, which saw it add more than 27,000 workers in 2020 and 2021. The company’s hiring spree continued through the first nine months of 2022, a period during which it brought on an additional 15,344 employees. Although the company was a significant beneficiary of the pandemic’s effects, its fortunes are changing in recent months. The company reported its July profit. first-ever revenue drop. The company has blamed its recent hardships on tough competition from TikTok and the release of Apple’s contentious App Tracking Transparency feature.
At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg’s bid on the MetaverseIt has failed to create any new revenue opportunities and is proving costly. Meta spent $15 billion since the beginning of 2021 to make virtual reality and augmented realities mainstream, but with little success. The company expects to lose more money on this project by 2023.
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