Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has announced its round of mass layoffs, following similar events that happened at Twitter HQ. Thousands of employees will be affected as these job cuts could begin as early as Wednesday.
The Wall Street Journal reports that 87,000 employees will be affected by the upcoming layoffs and could potentially be hit harder than Twitter. However, Meta’s situation is different compared to Twitter’s. Meta employees were warned about their situation back in June, according to the Verge.
Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, warned employees about “serious times” ahead via an internal memo. Alongside that, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg told employees in a companywide meeting in June that there are employees in the company that “shouldn’t be here.”
“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
The Verge reports that Meta’s virtual reality team lost over $3.7 billion during the past quarter due to investors’ doubts about Metaverse. Also, the company lost $9.4 billion this year, as the company’s stock price dropped to its lowest price since 2016.
Zuckerberg released a statement during Meta’s recent earnings call, saying that the company plans to focus their investments on “high priority growth areas,” and other teams could potentially shrink or “stay flat” in 2023.
“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. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
Meta has not released any comments regarding these upcoming layoffs. It’s currently unknown which departments will be affected.