The parent company of Facebook and Instagram could soon become the latest social-media giant to unleash massive layoffs.
Meta, which said it had more than 87,000 people on staff in September, plans to inform employees of potentially the biggest round of job cuts the company has ever seen, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The cuts would reportedly impact thousands of staffers, who could learn their fates as soon as this week.
Last week, Twitter laid off nearly half of its staff following billionaire Elon Musk’s purchase of the micro-blogging website.
Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Meta in 2004 under the name TheFacebook, Inc., spoke broadly about staffing plans during an earnings call last month.
“Some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year,” Zuckerberg said, according to WSJ. “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
Meta greatly boosted its staff over the past three years as the world turned to virtual interactions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, reportedly adding more than 40,000 jobs since 2020.
The cuts would come during a year in which Meta’s stock has plummeted by a whopping 70%. Zuckerberg told his staff in June that there are “probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
The company, which adopted the Meta Platforms, Inc. moniker last year, also owns the messaging service What’s App and virtual reality brand Oculus.
In under two years, Meta has reportedly poured $15 billion into growing an all-encompassing virtual reality experience known as the metaverse.
“I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment,” Zuckerberg said during the earnings call. “I think people are going to look back on decades from now and talk about the importance of the work that was done here.”
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I cannot feel sorry for anyone being laid off or fired there. With all their election tampering.
Me neither. Pity just being fired, is all they are getting.
Going to be lots of FB and Twitter liberals walking the streets. Try Coca Cola or Amazon. I hear they have some low paying jobs but you’ll have to actually show up.