Meta, parent company of Facebook, will announce large-scale job cuts as early as this week, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The report claims that the company is planning to cut “many thousands” of employees from the books, with the announcement expected to come as soon as Wednesday this week.
Read: About half of Twitter employees are now gone
Twitter announced that nearly 3,700 employees are being laid off last week, but the Meta retrenchments could be the largest workforce reduction conducted by any tech company this years. The company currently employs around 87,000 people, and the layoffs will be the first broad restructuring in Meta’s – and Facebook’s – history. The company declined to comment when asked for a statement by the publication.
“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas. So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an earlier earnings call. “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
Meta, like many other tech companies, grew significantly after the onset of the pandemic. The company added around 27,000 employees in 2020 and 2021, while so far this year the company has added more than 15,000 additional employees.
This year was the first time that the company reported a drop in revenue, blaming the headwinds on market saturation and a lot of competition from the likes of TikTok and YouTube.
Zuckerberg has also invested a lot of money into the metaverse, which hasn’t brought any dividends yet. They are expected to invest a further $5 billion on the metaverse to make it the go-to virtual workspace worldwide.