Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms said on Tuesday it would cut 10,000 jobs, the first Big Tech firm to announce a second round of mass layoffs.
“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,” Meta Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to staff on its website.
“With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted. We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May,” he wrote.
In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes, he said.
“Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. 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,” he added.
Worries of an economic downturn due to rising interest rates have sparked a series of mass job cuts across corporate America: from Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to Big Tech firms including Amazon.com and Microsoft, according to Reuters.
The move also came after Meta announced it is “winding down” its work with NFTs on Facebook and Instagram, Meta commerce and fintech lead Stephane Kasriel said in a Twitter thread on Monday.
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, according to Zuckerberg.
“Given this outlook, we’ll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success,” he said.”I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.”
“Profitability enables innovation. Operating our business more efficiently will give us the resources and confidence to achieve our long term vision by delivering sustainable financial results that make us an attractive company to work at and invest in,” he added.
Meta has in November slashed its headcount by 11,000, marking the first mass layoffs in its 18-year history. Its headcount stood at 86,482 at 2022-end, up 20 percent from a year ago, according to Reuters.
The tech industry has laid off nearly 290,000 workers since the start of 2022, with about 40 percent of them coming this year, data from the layoff tracking site layoffs.fyi showed.
Meta owns social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Keyword: Facebook-parent Meta to cut 10,000 jobs in second round of layoffs