San Francisco, March 11: Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company, plans more layoffs to be announced in multiple rounds over the coming months, totaling roughly the same magnitude as last year’s 13 percent workforce reduction year, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The new cuts, the first wave of which is expected to be announced next week, are likely to hit non-technical positions particularly hard, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is also expected to shut down some projects and teams related to these cuts.
Meta cut about 11,000 jobs, or about 13 percent of its employees, last year. This year’s cuts are expected to reach the same proportion of the remaining ones, the people said, although the final tally of the cumulative cuts expected in the second quarter isn’t clear yet. Meta layoffs: Facebook’s parent company will begin laying off another 11,000 employees in multiple waves next week.
Projects being cut include some wearable devices that were in the works at Reality Labs, Meta’s hardware and metaverse division, the people said, beating a short-term pullback from efforts to popularize virtual- and augmented -Reality products ahead, even as longer-term research efforts go on.
“We continue to look at the entire company, both the app family and Reality Labs, and really evaluate whether we’re directing our resources to the opportunities with the most leverage,” Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, said Thursday at the Morgan Stanley 2023 Technology. Media and Telecom Conference. “This will result in us making some tough decisions, halting projects in some places and reallocating resources away from some teams.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously said that 2023 would be a “year of efficiency” at Meta and that some projects at the company would likely be shelved, according to the WSJ.
The ongoing cuts are notable given that Zuckerberg had forecast in October that the company would end in 2023 with about the same number of employees as then. The company laid off 13 percent of its workforce the following month and then tried to encourage further turnover through the performance review process. Layoffs at Microsoft: Third round of job cuts hit supply chain, cloud and IoT workers
Technology companies like Amazon.com, Microsoft and others have shed thousands of jobs this year and are staying on as profits tumble from pandemic-related highs. Almost 300,000 workers have been laid off since 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts in the industry.
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