Meta announces 10,000 more job cuts in second round of layoffs

Meta, the Menlo Park-based parent company of social media companies Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced on Tuesday that it will lay off another 10,000 employees this spring, marking the second round of major layoffs by the social media company in the past year. 4 months.

Since last October, the Bay Area tech sector has announced massive layoffs, numbering in the tens of thousands. These include Twitter, Peloton, Lyft, Opendoor, Chime, Stripe, Intel, Microsoft, and many more. In January, Salesforce cut 10% of its workforce, or about 7,000 jobs, in just the latest round after several other cuts last year. Seattle-based Amazon has cut 18,000 jobs, many of which have moved to the Silicon Valley city of Sunnyvale. and Google laid off 12,000 employees. Last month, thousands of people lost their jobs due to the layoffs of former Silicon Valley stars PayPal, NetApp, Yahoo and Twilio.

Previously, Meta had a high number of layoffs in November, with 13% of the company’s entire workforce, or about 11,000 people, laid off. While other tech companies blame the economy, a looming recession, rising insurance costs, an increase in people working from home, and the rise of AI and automation, Meta noted in November that the first layoffs were based on increased competition eating into revenue from advertising. and misguided projections of e-commerce growth and how much revenue it will generate post-pandemic.

“At the start of Covid, the world quickly moved online, and the surge in e-commerce led to excessive revenue growth,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in November. “Many predicted that this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the end of the pandemic. So did I, which is why I made the decision to significantly increase our investment. Unfortunately, things didn’t go the way I expected. Not only is online commerce back on track, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition and loss of advertising signals have resulted in our revenues being much lower than I expected.”

Despite the sharp cuts, Zuckerberg has not ruled out any future cuts for 2023. During last month’s quarterly earnings call, he even hinted that more layoffs were coming due to his desire to make 2023 a “year of efficiency.”

“We ended last year with some difficult layoffs and restructuring of some teams. When we did this, I made it clear that this was the beginning of our focus on efficiency, not the end,” Zuckerberg said last month. “As part of that, we are going to be more aggressive in cutting back on projects that don’t work or may no longer be as important, but my focus is on improving the efficiency of how we deliver on our top priorities. We will remove some levels of middle management in order to make decisions faster.”

10,000 people fired at Meta

This led to Meta on Tuesday announcing another 10,000 job openings, effectively reducing the company by 25% from a year ago. In addition, an additional 5,000 vacancies that are currently open or unfilled will be removed. In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said slow growth, declining ad revenue, higher interest rates and other factors have led to layoffs this week, with declines expected for tech companies in general over the next few years.

“Job cuts will happen over the next few months,” Meta’s CEO said. “We expect to announce restructuring and layoffs in our technical groups at the end of April and then in our business groups at the end of May. In some cases, these changes may take until the end of the year to complete. Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by about 10,000 people and close about 5,000 additional open positions that we have not yet hired.”

“Last year was a humble wake-up call. The global economy has changed, competition has intensified, and our growth has slowed significantly. For now, I think we should brace ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will persist for many years to come. Higher interest rates lead to a leaner economy, increased geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and higher costs of innovation.”

Tech experts noted on Tuesday that Meta is likely not to be the only Silicon Valley tech company to have a second round of massive layoffs this year as many economic and manufacturing factors continue to work against them.

“A few years ago, laying off 10,000 people from Facebook would have been unthinkable,” Julie Ochs, a San Jose-based headhunter and hiring specialist, told The Globe Tuesday. “Now it’s not even front-page news. Tech companies continue to dwindle as economic uncertainty persists and new concerns emerge. There is a big push for AI programs right now, which is generating some excitement, but past endeavors like NFTs and virtual worlds are quickly failing. Many layoffs at Meta were actually NFT related. And don’t forget the Silicon Valley bank fiasco that hurt them too.”

“As more quarterly reports come out, we will likely see more of these companies announce another round of layoffs. It was hard there, and the current climate is not good for them.”

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