Meta formerly known as Facebook is reportedly planning to layoff thousands of employees this week. The headcount reduction is expected to be the largest in the company’s history and could happen as early as Wednesday, according to Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of the company had hinted at the impending layoffs in a Facebook post on 26 October 2022.
“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 organisation than we are today,” Zuckerberg said.
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Meta is grappling with a negative turn in the market exacerbated by heavy investments in its metaverse business. The company’s share has declined by 73 percent so far this year. A weak holiday quarter impacted Meta’s revenue wiping $67 billion off the company’s stock market value, adding to the more than half a trillion dollars in value already lost this year.
It appears that Meta has the backing of some investors including Altimeter which wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg and called for reduction in the over 87,000 workforce the company has on its payroll. The investor also believes that Meta’s spending and pivot to the metaverse has affected investors’ confidence.
