Facebook owner Meta gears up for mass job cuts
Things seem to go from bad to worse for Meta, with the Facebook owner gearing up to announce mass layoffs this week.
Sources told the Wall Street Journal that thousands of jobs are set to be culled, as the firm fends off the wider tech sell-off and slowing advertising spend.
Meta declined to comment on the reports, and instead referred Morning Wire to chief exec Mark Zuckerberg’s third-quarter results statement that said the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.”
Zuckerberg said that this would mean “some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year”.
The Silicon Valley titan said profits had halved during the third quarter as its ad-supported platforms like Facebook and Instagram struggle with inflation and rising interest rates.
Around $80bn (£69bn) was wiped off the company’s market value following the news, leaving shares down over 70 per cent in the year to date.
Meta has imposed a hiring freeze after it added more than 27,000 employees in 2020 and 2021 combined,
However, Meta is not alone in this downturn, with the likes of Google parent firm Alphabet and Microsoft also slowing hiring as they try to cut costs and mitigate plateauing sales.
It is also an issue that Twitter is grappling with under the command of its new CEO Elon Musk.
Musk told followers last week that he has had “no choice” but to start cutting the social media firm’s 7,500 workforce as he aims to make it “healthy”.
He said Twitter was losing more than $4m (£3.5m) a day, or about $1,000 every minute.
Ex Twitter chief executive officer Jack Dorsey apologised to former colleagues for the dramatic turn of events.
“I realize many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that,” he wrote in a post.
Payment firms PayPal and Stripe also recently announced plans to scrap hundreds of jobs