Meta to let go 10,000 more workers in a fresh round of layoffs

Facebook parent Meta has announced another round of layoffs, which will impact 10,000 workers this time, as part of the company’s goal to become more efficient and improve financial performance. 

“We expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven't yet hired,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post on Tuesday. 

Zuckerberg also announced that Meta will invest in tools that will make them more effective in the coming years. He said that it could be anything from building AI tools to help engineers write better code faster, automate workloads, or identify and phase out obsolete tasks.

Last November, the social media company cut 13% of its workforce and let go of over 11,000 workers. Zuckerberg said that since last year’s job cuts many things have gone faster at the company.

“A leaner organisation will execute its highest priorities faster. People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling,” he added. 

The latest round makes it the second biggest layoff in the social media company’s history. Its biggest platform Facebook reportedly has over 2.96 billion monthly active users. 

Zuckerberg further said that over the next few months, team leaders across the company will announce restructuring plans, cancel low-priority projects, and reduce hiring.

Restructuring and layoffs in tech teams will be announced in late April while layoffs in business groups will be announced in late May. Recruitment teams will also be cut due to the hiring freeze. 

“We will make our organisation flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors. We'll also have individual contributors report into almost every level so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster,” said Zuckerberg. 

He added that timelines for restructuring across locations outside the US will look different and more details will be shared by local team leaders. 

Hiring and transfer freezes will be lifted once the restructuring is completed in each group, said Zuckerberg, adding that by summer the company will aim to complete the analysis of learning from hybrid work so the distributed work model can be improved and made more efficient. 

Meta employees returned to work last March but were given the option to request full-time remote work or extend remote work by 3 to 5 months. 

The social media company, which is planning to become a metaverse company and has invested billions of dollars in it, suffered its first quarterly revenue decline last July. In the latest quarterly earnings results, released in February, Meta reported a 4% year-on-year (YoY) decline in quarterly revenue to $32.17 billion, while the cost and expenses grew by 22% to $25.77 billion. 

“For most of our history, we saw rapid revenue growth year after year and had the resources to invest in many new products. But last year was a humbling wake-up call. The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably,” said Zuckerberg. 

Further, Zuckerberg thanked the company employees for their efforts and assured support to those who are likely to be impacted by the fresh round of layoffs. 

All major tech companies have been impacted by the economic downturn and fear of recession, forcing them to cut jobs and freeze new hirings. In January, Google announced that it will lay off 12,000 employees across the world, while Microsoft announced 10,000 job cuts.