On Tuesday, Meta, the company that owns Facebook, made the announcement that it would be terminating the employment of more than 11,000 workers.
“I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go,” Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, said in a letter to staff. “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.”
“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted,” he said.
The billionaire claimed that from the beginning of the pandemic, he and “many people” projected that the rise of e-commerce would be a “permanent acceleration.”
Because of this, the decision was made to considerably raise the amount of money invested in Meta.
“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,” Zuckerberg said. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”
Now, the Meta chief says the company needs to become more capital efficient, with an emphasis on cutting costs across the business and shifting resources into a smaller number of “high-priority growth areas.”
According to him, these areas consist of the metaverse, the advertising and business platforms, and the AI discovery engine.
“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,” he said.
The employees will “soon” receive an email explaining the implications of the layoff in further detail. Users who are leaving the company on Tuesday will have their access to the majority of Meta systems terminated, “given the amount of access to sensitive information.”
Because Meta intends to hire fewer individuals in 2023, the recruiting process will be negatively impacted to a greater extent than any other area of the company. However, some teams will be more adversely affected than others.
According to Zuckerberg, this is a “sad time” for everyone involved, both those who are staying and those who are departing.
“I believe we are deeply underestimated as a company today. Billions of people use our services to connect, and our communities keep growing. Our core business is among the most profitable ever built with huge potential ahead. And we’re leading in developing the technology to define the future of social connection and the next computing platform. We do historically important work,” Zuckerberg concluded. “I’m confident that if we work efficiently, we’ll come out of this downturn stronger and more resilient than ever.”
These layoffs come after Twitter fired half of its workforce last week.
