Facebook parent company Meta will lay off 11,000 employees

 Facebook parent company Meta will lay off 11,000 employees

The biggest major employment layoffs in the history of the digital behemoth have been announced by Facebook parent company Meta on Wednesday: 11,000 people will be laid off.

The layoffs occur as Meta faces several threats to its main business and places a risky and expensive wager on shifting to the metaverse. It also happens to coincide with a wave of recent layoffs at other IT companies as the booming industry responds to high inflation, increasing interest rates, and concerns about an impending recession.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed staff in a blog post, saying, "Today I'm discussing some of the most challenging changes we've ever made at Meta." "I've made the decision to let more than 11,000 people go and cut our team size by around 13%."

Many areas of the firm will be affected by the job layoffs, but Zuckerberg said in the essay that Meta's recruitment team will be particularly severely impacted because "we're expecting to employ fewer people next year." With limited exceptions, he said, a hiring freeze will be maintained until the first quarter.

According to a September SEC report, Meta had more than 87,000 employees.

Apple's privacy reforms, advertisers' reduced advertising spending, and more competition from upstart rivals like TikTok have all hurt Meta's primary ad sales business. While everything is going on, Meta has been investing billions to create the metaverse, a futuristic version of the internet that is still years away from becoming widely used.

The firm reported its second consecutive quarterly revenue decrease and stated its profit was down by 50% from the previous year last month. Last year, Meta's market worth was over $1 trillion; today, it is just about $250 billion.

In his post on Wednesday, Zuckerberg stated, "I want to accept ownership for these actions and for how we got here. "I realize this is difficult for everyone, and I'm sorry to those impacted in particular,"

Following the announcement, shares of Meta increased 5% in pre-market trading on Wednesday.

When the pandemic began in March 2020, Meta had 48,268 employees, which was almost twice as many as it had in September.

In recent months, a few software businesses have announced hiring freezes or employment layoffs, frequently after seeing fast expansion during the epidemic. Both the ridesharing startup Lyft and the company that processes payments, Stripe, announced layoffs of 13% and 14% of their respective workforces, respectively, last week. The same day, e-commerce behemoth Amazon said it was pausing corporate recruiting.

Last week, Elon Musk, the company's new owner, also announced massive layoffs at Twitter, a competitor to Facebook.

In addition to the layoffs, Zuckerberg stated that the business anticipates "rolling out additional cost-cutting initiatives" in the near future. According to him, Meta, which is well known for its enormous, perks-filled offices like those of other tech companies, is evaluating its real estate requirements and "transitioning to desk sharing for workers who already spend most of their time outside the office."