Meta has announced another round of mass layoffs in a bid to cut costs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is laying off another 10,000 workers and closing “about 5,000 additional open positions that we haven’t hired yet.”
Meta will reduce the size of its recruiting team imminently and will inform affected employees on Wednesday. The company will then announce restructuring efforts and layoffs for its technology departments at the end of April and business teams at the end of May. Zuckerberg said it could take until the end of 2023 to complete the process, but the timelines could be different for Meta’s non-US operations. Following the restructuring, Meta plans to lift the hiring freeze.
“This will be difficult and there is no way around it. It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been a part of our success,” Zuckerberg wrote. “They have dedicated themselves to our mission and I am personally grateful for all their efforts. We will support people the same way we have before and treat everyone with the gratitude they deserve.”
In addition, the company will “announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our organizations” and canceling lower-priority projects, Zuckerberg said. Reports have suggested the layoffs will affect teams working on wearables as part of Reality Labs’ hardware and metaverse division. “Flattening” involves removing layers of management, while Meta “will ask many managers to step down.” become individual contributors”; In other words, it looks like managers will have to take on some of the tasks their employees are focused on.
“We still believe that managing each person is very important, so in general we don’t want managers to have more than 10 direct reports. Today, many of our managers only have a few direct reports,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It made sense to optimize it to onboard new managers and maintain buffer capacity when we were growing our organization faster, but now that we don’t expect to grow headcount as quickly, it makes more sense to fully utilize the capacity of each manager and layers of defragmentation. as much as possible.”
In November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 people, which was about 13 percent of its workforce at the time. That marked the company’s first round of mass layoffs.
The latest cost reduction campaign was widely anticipated. financial time, Bloomberg and the edge all have reported in recent weeks that more layoffs were in the works. Zuckerberg, who will soon go on paternity leave with his third child, recently described 2023 as an “efficiency year” for the company and doubled down on it in his note to employees today.
“Since we reduced our workforce last year, a surprising result is that many things have moved faster. In hindsight, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower-priority projects,” he wrote. “A more efficient organization will execute its highest priorities faster. People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling.”
The latest layoffs follow a year in which Meta saw its first quarterly revenue declines due to a slowdown in its advertising business. In October, the company also said it expected to lose more money on Reality Labs (the division that runs Meta’s augmented and virtual reality initiatives) in 2023 as it continues to build on its vision of the metaverse. Zuckerberg addressed this in his note, stating that “I think we need to prepare for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years to come.”
Last week, Meta announced price cuts for the Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets in a bid to sell more units. The company recently revealed another potential revenue stream in the form of Meta Verified, which allows users to pay for Instagram and Facebook verification along with other perks.
Many notable tech companies have announced major rounds of layoffs in recent months, including Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft. Twitter has been losing staff almost continuously since Elon Musk took over in October. So Meta isn’t alone here, but he is the first among his peers to have a second formal round of layoffs since late 2022.
