Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said Tuesday it planned to lay off about 10,000 employees, or about 13 percent of its workforce, the latest move to break with what company founder Mark Zuckerberg called an “efficiency year.”
The layoffs will affect its recruiting team this week, with a shakeup of its technology and business groups in April and May, Zuckerberg said. said in a note posted on the company website. The new announcement is the company’s second round of cuts in the past half year. In November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its workforce at the time.
Meta also plans to close some 5,000 job openings that have not yet been filled, Zuckerberg said in the memo.
“This will be difficult and there is no way around it,” he wrote.
Zuckerberg is recruiting after years of hiring at a breakneck pace. His company gobbled up workers when his family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp, became popular around the world. The coronavirus pandemic also supercharged the use of mobile apps, leading to further growth. At its peak last year, Meta had 87,000 full-time employees.
But as the global economy turned sour and digital ad markets shrank last year, Zuckerberg began to rein in the rampant growth. Target employee benefits cut. And after the November layoffs, which heavily affected business divisions and recruiting teams, Zuckerberg hinted at more cuts.
On an earnings call in February, the chief executive said he didn’t want the company overburdened with a layer of middle managers, or “managers run by managers.” He said he took responsibility for last year’s layoffs and blamed his zeal for increasing staff on increased usage early in the pandemic.
Meta is dealing with a lot of challenges these days. It’s dealing not only with a slowdown in digital advertising, but also with Apple’s privacy changes to its mobile operating system, which have restricted Meta’s ability to collect data about iPhone users to help target ads. It also faces strong competition from TikTok, whose popularity has skyrocketed in recent years.
Meta is also in the midst of a rocky transition to become a “metaverse” company, connecting people to an immersive digital world through virtual reality headsets and apps. Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as the next-generation computing platform, so Meta has been spending billions of dollars on the effort and reassigning workers to its Reality Labs division, which focuses on products for the metaverse.
However, it’s not clear if people will want to use metaverse products. In recent months, the public has turned to chatbots, which are based on artificial intelligence. Meta has invested in AI for years, but lately it hasn’t been at the center of the conversation about the technology.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Gregory Schmidt contributed reporting.
