Meta has announced another round of sweeping layoffs in a bid to cut costs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is letting go another 10,000 workers or so and “close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.”
Meta will reduce the size of its recruiting team imminently and inform affected employees on Wednesday. The company will then announce layoff and restructuring efforts of its tech departments in late April and business teams in late May. Zuckerberg said it might take until the end of 2023 to complete the process, but the timelines might be different for Meta’s operations outside the US.
In November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 people, which equated to around 13 percent of its headcount at the time. That marked the company’s first mass layoffs. Four months later, Meta announced planscutting thousands more workers.
The latest cost-cutting drive was widely expected. The Financial Times, Bloomberg and The Verge have all reported in recent weeks that more layoffs were in the pipeline. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who will soon go on paternity leave for his third child, recently described 2023 as a “year of efficiency” for the company and doubled down on that in his note to employees today.
The latest layoffs follow a year in which Meta saw declines in quarterly revenue for the first time as its ad business slowed down. In October, the company also said it expected to lose more money on Reality Labs (the division that runs Meta’s virtual and augmented reality initiatives) in 2023 as it continues to build its vision of the metaverse.
Last week, Meta announced price cuts for the Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets in an attempt to sell more units. The company recently unveiled another potential revenue stream in the form of Meta Verified, which allows users to pay for Instagram and Facebook verification along with some other perks.
Many notable tech companies have announced major rounds of layoffs over the last several months, including Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft. Twitter has been shedding staff almost on an ongoing basis since Elon Musk took over in October. So, Meta isn’t alone here, but it’s the first among its peers to have a second formal round of mass layoffs since late 2022.
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/zuckerberg-touts-year-of-efficiency-as-meta-lays-off-an-additional-10000-workers-131957819.html?src=rss
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