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Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has announced over 11,000 layoffs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to employees Wednesday: “Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.”
According to the the message from Zuckerberg, employees who are laid off will receive “16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.” The layoffs follow a cost-cutting trend among big tech companies; Amazon recently announced that they would be extending a hiring freeze, and Apple is instituting a partial hiring freeze in October. Twitter announced drastic layoffs after being purchased by Elon Musk last month.
Zuckerberg, who attributed the layoffs to poor investments in the wake of COVID-19, also said: “We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1 … 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.”
Zuckerberg said in his statement that the strategy of increased investments backfired: “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.”
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