As of September 30, Meta employed over 87,000 people, so the job cuts affect over 13% of the company.
In response to disappointing earnings and revenue declines, Facebook’s parent company Meta announced that it was terminating more than 11,000 employees. Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, and Microsoft also laid off many employees.
Meta has undergone some of the most challenging changes in its history. In a blog post today, Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was reducing the size of his team by about 13% and letting more than 11,000 talented employees go.
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In addition, we have extended our hiring freeze through Q1 to become leaner and more efficient.” Zuckerberg said.
Apologizing to Meta employees, Mark Zuckerberg took responsibility for his decisions. He apologized to those affected and took responsibility for how we arrived at these decisions.
For every year of service, employees will receive two additional weeks of severance pay. Employees will receive six-month coverage as part of the health insurance plan.
This reduction marks Facebook’s first significant budget cut since its inception in 2004, as digital advertising revenue has declined sharply, the economy is teetering on the brink of recession, and Mark Zuckerberg has invested heavily in a speculative virtual reality project called the metaverse.
Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized the company’s need to become more capital-efficient and said it would shift
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resources to “high priority growth areas” like its AI discovery engine and ads platform, along with its metaverse initiative.
In addition to Meta’s job cuts, Twitter announced them last week after selling the company to Elon Musk, which resulted in approximately 50% of its workforce being cut.
During those layoffs, it was a chaotic time, as many employees learned they had lost their jobs when their Slack or email accounts were suddenly disconnected.
As a result of the moves, Musk said the social network was facing losses. Later, he requested that some fired employees return to work.
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