Facebook parent company Meta announces another 10,000 layoffs

Facebook parent company Meta has confirmed it will cut 10,000 jobs in coming months, on top of the 11,000 that were slashed in December, shrinking its staff count by another 13 percent. 

Combined, the cuts account for just under a quarter of the company’s 86,000-person workforce. Zuckerberg made the announcement on his Facebook page, sharing the internal memo he sent employees. 

The layoffs will take effect in tech teams at the end of April, and in business branches in May.   

‘Here’s the timeline you should expect: over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates. 

‘Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired. 

‘This will be tough and there’s no way around that. It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success.’ 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the layoffs in an announcement on Tuesday morning 

Zuckerberg, writing on his Facebook page, said the layoffs were part of the company’s ‘year of efficiency’ 

The layoffs are part of a wider strategy to make the company more ‘efficient and lean’. 

‘Leaner is better. Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects,’ he said. 

He specified that removing layers of management had resulted in faster efficiency.  

The market reacted favorably to the news – shares rose by 5.5 percent after the announcement.  

Now, Meta will have around 60,000 employees. Company spokesmen did not clarify which region the cuts would apply to, or if they are global. 

In his announcement, Zuckerberg pointed to the disastrous downturn of tech stocks as one of the reasons for the scale-back. 

‘Last year was a humbling wake-up call. The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably. We scaled back budgets, shrunk our real estate footprint, and made the difficult decision to lay off 13% of our workforce. 

‘At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years. 

‘Higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation. 

‘Given this outlook, we’ll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success.

‘In the face of this new reality, most companies will scale back their long term vision and investments,’ he said. 

Meta’s problems are in line with a wider round of layoffs in the tech industry, where growth had once seemed invincible. 

Microsoft has also launched a third round of layoffs that are part of its previously announced slashing of 10,000 jobs. Twitter staff were rocked by brutal layoffs and chaos triggered with Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of the company.  

Now, Meta will have around 60,000 employees. Company spokesmen did not clarify which region the cuts would apply to, or if they are global. Above, the company’s HQ in Menlo Park