Meta announced its first round of job cuts in November last year.
American multinational tech giant Meta announced its second round of mass layoffs on Tuesday. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company will reduce the team size by around 10,000 employees and further close around 5,000 open roles.
In a blog, Zuckerberg said Meta leaders will announce over the next couple of months its restructuring plans focused on flattening the organization, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing its hiring rates. While the impacted people in Meta’s recruiting team will be informed today, the company expects to announce restructurings and layoffs in its tech groups in late April followed by business groups in late May.
However, timelines for the company’s international teams will look different, and local leaders at Meta will follow up with more details. The parent company of social media majors Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp aims to implement the changes through the end of the year. After restructuring, Zuckerberg also plans to lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group.
Meta announced its first round of job cuts in November last year and laid off more than 11,000 employees, or almost 13% of its workforce at the time. The company then announced to also freeze new hiring. Calling 2023 “the year of efficiency,” Zuckerberg said last month to bring the company’s costs under control.
“In addition to helping us build a better technology company, our other goal for the Year of Efficiency is to improve our business performance given the new economic reality,” Zuckerberg said in the blog yesterday. “For most of our history, we saw rapid revenue growth year after year and had the resources to invest in many new products. But last year was a humbling wake-up call.”
Meta’s second round of layoffs is coming at a time when several tech companies including Sundar Pichai-led Alphabet, Elon Musk-led Twitter, and Satya Nadella-led Microsoft, among others, are laying off thousands of employees in an attempt to gear up for a global economic slowdown. In a nutshell, a setback in consumer spending due to high inflation and interest rates along with the threat of a looming recession this year has pushed corporates to keep a lid on their spending.
“At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years,” Zuckerberg added. According to a Reuters report, with the latest move, Meta’s expenses in 2023 are expected to come down between $86 billion and $92 billion. This is lower than the earlier projection of $89 billion to $95 billion.
Meta shares rose 6% on the news.
