Meta starts firing employees after months of speculations Meta starts laying off a significant portion of its employees, numerous reports from US media suggest. The new episode of layoffs could be the biggest in the tech company’s history. Facebook was founded in the year 2004 and in 2022, it renamed itself to 'Meta'.
This switch hinted at a major shift in the company's future plans and is also one of the reasons why Meta is letting go of some of its employees. Meta will be sending out emails to employees during the early hours of Wednesday (Eastern Time). Reportedly Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a word with the company's executives sharing the information about the upcoming round of mass layoffs.
According to a report by WSJ, Mark Zuckerberg did take responsibility for the situation. The Meta CEO claimed that the situation was partly due to his over-optimism for the growth of the company.
The inflated workforce was a direct result of it. Meta has been under the investor's scanner due to a weak financial outlook for both the current quarter as well as the upcoming year. Meta witnessed a sharp dip in stock price after it announced that it is expected to make losses next year due to its investments in emerging technology. Zuckerberg later assured investors that they will be rewarded in the future if they continue to invest in the company.
Meta is expected to layoff over 10 per cent of its entire workforce. For some context, this 10 per cent is more than the entire workforce of Twitter, even before Elon Musk went on a firing spree. At the end of September, Meta had more than 87,000 employees across the globe. A reduction of 10 per cent will lead to the biggest round of layoffs this year, in the tech industry. Apart from Meta and Twitter, many other tech brands are on a path to trim their expenditures.
In his statement, Zuckerberg acknowledges his mistakes in the past few years that led to the 'last resort' of firing over 11,000 employees. In his statement he claimed that Covid led to a massive spurt in revenue, which was expected to continue. However, growth flatlined with no improvements in revenue.
Meta had been struggling to achieve its advertising revenue targets mainly due to Apple's new privacy feature. This feature allowed Apple users to completely disable targeted ads, one of Facebook's biggest money makers.
This has been the biggest layoff in Meta's 18-year history. The company was founded in the year 2004 and for the most part, it has witnessed a fair amount of growth. However, the layoffs were preceded by weak financial outlook for next year and even the current quarter.
He took complete responsibility for the layoffs. He said in his statement, "I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I'm especially sorry to those impacted."
Mark Zuckerberg shared a statement on the firings during the early hours on Wednesday.
He said, "Today I'm sharing some of the most difficult changes we've made in Meta's history. I've decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1."
Meta has issued a statement claiming to have sacked 13 per cent of its entire workforce. The 13 per cent amounts to over 11,000 employees. The company has a total strength of over 87,000 employees.
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