Meta Expected To Announce Mass Layoffs This Week

Facebook parent Meta is planning to announce large-scale layoffs this week that are likely to affect thousands of employees worldwide, according to reports.

The cuts are likely to be announced as early as Wednesday, US media reported.

Meta recently disappointed investors with its third-quarter results.

At the time Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas“, meaning that “some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink” over the next year.

Job cuts

He said at the end of 2023 staffing levels could be “roughly the same” or “even slightly smaller”.

Meta is currently worth around $250 billion (£220bn), down from more than $1tn a year ago. The company’s share price rose about 5 percent in morning trading on Monday following the reports.

While delivering the company’s latest quarterly results Zuckerberg said the company would focus on developing Instagram Reels – an effort to compete with TikTok – as well as advertising and developing the metaverse.

Reality Labs, which develops Meta’s metaverse products, lost $3.7bn during the quarter and the company said the losses would “grow significantly” over the coming year.

‘Experimental bets’

But Zuckerberg said he remained committed to “experimental bets” such as the metaverse – which uses wearable devices to provide an immersive experience – which he said represented “historic” work.

But major shareholder Altimeter Capital Management in an open letter late last month urged Meta to streamline operations by cutting jobs and capital expenditure, adding that the company had llst investor confidence with its increased spending and its focus on relatively little-used metaverse technology.

In its results Meta said it expects to lose $10bn in ad revenue over full-year 2022 due to privacy changes by Apple that allow iPhone users to opt out of ad tracking across apps.

Other ad-dependent social media firms have suffered amidst macroeconomic turbulence, with Twitter last week initiating mass layoffs expected to affect about half of its workforce.