Meta Platforms Inc, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is considering a fresh round of layoffs and is planning to cut thousands of employees this week, Bloomberg reported citing unidentified sources. This would follow a 13 per cent reduction in workforce in November 2022, which was done to make Meta an efficient organisation. After the last round of layoffs, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to his employees, “I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13 per cent and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. 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.”
The November layoffs had affected employees across departments and regions and recruitment and business teams were affected more. People who were not affected much were engineers working on projects related to the metaverse. Meta has been working to flatten the organisation, giving buyout packages to managers and cutting whole teams that it deems non-essential, Bloomberg said.
New layoffs for financial targets, separate from flattening
The upcoming round of layoffs is being driven by financial targets and is separate from the ‘flattening’, the sources told Bloomberg. They said that Meta has seen a slowdown in advertising revenue and is now shifting focus to metaverse and has been asking directors and vice presidents to present a list of employees that can be terminated. The plan to announce the layoff is expected to be finalised before Mark Zuckerberg goes on parental leave for his third child.
Earlier in February, Mark Zuckerberg had dubbed 2023 as Meta’s “year of efficiency”. In a statement after the release of MEta’s fourth-quarter earnings report, he had said, “Our management theme for 2023 is the ‘Year of Efficiency’ and we’re focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization.” While Meta reported better-than-expected revenue in the fourth quarter, sales still fell 4 per cent from a year earlier.
Layoffs have been more or less the theme this year as well with a number of multinational companies announcing termination of their workforce. Twitter recently fired at least 200 of its workforce just days after firing dozens of employees across its sales and engineering departments. This was despite Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s promise to his employees in November of ‘no further layoffs’ after eliminating 3,700 jobs.