Following rumors last week that the tech-giant Meta would look to cut thousands of more jobs, the talk came to fruition this week when the company announced it was eliminating 10,000 roles and 5,000 job listings.
The cuts will take place “over the next couple of months,” according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who talked about the decision in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
“We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The CEO shared that in some cases, the position restructuring could take until the end of this year as the total headcount at Meta is expected to fall to around 66,000 after it hit 87,314 in September of last year, according to a securities filing.
This is now the second largest round of cuts that the company has ever made and comes just four months after it cut the most positions ever, when 11,000 jobs, or 13% of the workforce, were eliminated in November.
“The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably,” Zuckerberg wrote while explaining his reasoning for the layoffs, saying recent struggles have been a “humbling wake-up call.”
It was reported last week by Bloomberg that Meta was considering another round of cuts, with some close to the situation expecting it to happen before Zuckerberg goes on parental leave for the birth of his third child.
The CEO previously said during a February earnings call that 2023 was going to be a big year for the company, dubbing it the “year of efficiency.”
Now, Zuckerberg appears to be preparing himself and his company for the possibility that current economic strife isn’t leaving anytime soon, noting Tuesday that this could be a new reality.
“At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years,” Zuckerberg added. “Higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation.”
Meta isn’t the only company in the tech and entertainment sphere to have layoffs recently, as the Walt Disney Co. cut 7,000 jobs last month, Amazon cut 10,000 in November, and companies like Twitter, Microsoft, Google, Lyft, and more have also reduced staffing within the last year.
As Meta continues to see profits and revenue decline, the company will continue in what Zuckerberg called “flattening” efforts, making it a possibility that more restructuring could be coming.
“As part of this, we’re going to be more proactive about cutting projects that aren’t performing or may no longer be as crucial, but my main focus is on increasing the efficiency of how we execute our top priorities,” Zuckerberg said during his February earnings call.
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