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Thousands of Meta staff face being laid off in huge cuts

By Nithya Bose in US business news, posted November 7, 2022

Facebook parent Meta intends to start massive layoffs this week, with thousands of staff likely to lose their jobs.

A formal announcement is expected as early as Wednesday, November 9 on the Facebook owner's plans, but sources say it could be one of the largest layoff programmes in a recent series of tech companies cutting staff.

At the end of September, Meta had over 87,000 members of staff.

Sources said the company officials have already instructed staff to cancel non-essential travel beginning this week.

The proposed cuts would be the first dramatic headcount reduction in the company's 18-year history.

The job losses will be fewer in percentage than Twitter's, which hit half of its workforce.

However, the number of Meta employees about to be sacked could be the largest ever at a major technology firm in a year of tech-industry downturn.

A Meta representative declined to comment, citing CEO Mark Zuckerberg's recent statement that the firm will "focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.

“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.”

It was reported Meta was aiming to cut costs by at least 10 percent in the months ahead, mostly through redundancies.

The reductions are likely to be revealed later this week.

This follows several months of more targeted job cuts in which staff were managed out or had their roles eliminated.

Mr. Zuckerberg said previously: “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”

During the pandemic, Meta, like other tech behemoths, began a hiring spree as life and business shifted increasingly online.

It hired almost 27,000 people in 2020 and 2021 combined, and another 15,344 in the first nine months of this year, nearly one-fourth of that in the most recent quarter.

Investors have been concerned by the firm's spending and risks to its core social-media business.

Growth in several markets has stopped due to tough competition from TikTok.

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Meta's expenses have also skyrocketed, resulting in a 98 percent drop in free cash flow in the most recent quarter.

Mr. Zuckerberg's push to the metaverse, which has cost the business $15 billion since the beginning of last year, has contributed significantly to Meta's soaring costs.

He has described the metaverse as a network of interconnected virtual worlds where people will someday work, play, live, and shop.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

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