Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to lay off another 10,000 workers

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said on Tuesday it plans to lay off around 10,000 employees, or about 13% of its workforce, the latest move to follow what company founder Mark Zuckerberg called it a “year of efficiency.” »

The layoffs will affect its recruiting team this week, with a restructuring of its technology and business groups coming in April and May, Zuckerberg said in a memo posted on the company’s 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, about 13% of its workforce at the time.

Meta also plans to close about 5,000 job openings that have not yet been filled, Zuckerberg said in the memo. Other restructuring efforts include a plan to conclude this summer an analysis of Meta’s hybrid back-to-office model, which it began testing last March.

“It will be difficult and there is no getting around it,” he wrote.

Mr. Zuckerberg is eliminating employees after years of hiring at a breakneck pace. His company has gobbled up workers as his family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp, have become popular around the world. The coronavirus pandemic has also boosted the use of mobile apps, leading to greater growth. At its peak last year, Meta had 87,000 full-time employees.

But as the global economy deteriorated and digital advertising markets contracted last year, Mr. Zuckerberg began to halt unchecked growth. Employee perks have been reduced in meta. And after the November layoffs, which largely affected business divisions and recruiting teams, Mr. Zuckerberg hinted at further cuts.

In an earnings call in February, the chief executive said he didn’t want the company to be overburdened with a layer of middle managers, or “managers managing directors”. He said he took responsibility for last year’s layoffs, blaming his zeal for staffing on the surge in utilization at the start of the pandemic.

Meta faces many challenges these days. It’s grappling not only with a slowdown in digital advertising, but also Apple’s privacy changes to its mobile operating system, which have limited Meta’s ability to collect data on iPhone users. to help target advertisements. It also faces strong competition from TikTok, which has grown in popularity over the past few years.

Meta is also in the midst of a delicate transition to becoming a “metaverse” company, connecting people to an immersive digital world through virtual reality headsets and apps. Mr. Zuckerberg sees the Metaverse as the next-generation computing platform. Meta has therefore spent billions of dollars on this effort and reassigned workers to its Reality Labs division, which focuses on products for the metaverse.

Still, it’s not clear if people will want to use metaverse products. In recent months, the public has instead turned to chatbots, which are based on artificial intelligence. Meta has been investing in AI for years but hasn’t been front and center in the technology conversation lately.

In his Tuesday announcement, Zuckerberg outlined a new vision to streamline the company’s organization, including removing layers of management, ending lower-priority projects and rebalancing product teams by putting the focus on engineering. He added that the moves were a response to global conditions including increased regulation, geopolitical instability, higher interest rates and a cooling economy.

“The global economy has changed, competitive pressures have increased and our growth has slowed significantly,” he said. “We must prepare for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years to come.”

Gregory Schmidt contributed report.