New York: In a not-so-surprising move, Facebook owner Meta sacked over 11k employees. As Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg fired about 13 per cent of the global workforce, employees were informed about the layoffs over their emails. The move comes days after Elon Musk owned Twitter announced the firing of close to 50% of its global workforce. Netizens reacted to these sacking on social media calling them ‘one of the worst lay-offs ever in the tech industry’.
Meta’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg while announcing the same said this is the ‘most difficult change’ that he had to do and he is ‘Sorry’ to those who will get impacted by this.
“At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”
“In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient. We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse. We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go.”
At Meta, employees will continue to have access to their emails so that they can say goodbye to colleagues, though they’ve been cut off from more sensitive corporate systems, Zuckerberg said. US workers who were cut will also get 16 weeks of their base salary as severance, plus two weeks for every year they worked at the company. The company is also offering six months of health-care coverage as well as career services and immigration support. Packages will be similar outside the US, in keeping with local employment laws.
Meta, whose stock has plunged 71% this year, is taking steps to pare costs following several quarters of disappointing earnings and a slide in revenue. The retrenchment, the company’s most drastic since the founding of Facebook in 2004, reflects a sharp slowdown in the digital advertising market, an economy wobbling on the brink of recession and Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar investment in a speculative virtual-reality push called the metaverse.
Zuckerberg had warned employees in late September that Meta intended to slash expenses and restructure teams to adapt to a changing market. The Menlo Park, California-based company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, implemented a hiring freeze, and the CEO said at the time that Meta expected headcount to be smaller in 2023 than it is this year.
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