Mark Zuckerberg, taking responsibility for the decisions, apologized to the fired employees.
New Delhi:
Facebook’s parent company Meta announced today that it will be laying off more than 11,000 employees, in an effort to reduce costs after disappointing earnings and falling revenue. The widespread job cuts entailed layoffs at other major tech companies including Twitter and Microsoft owned by Elon Musk.
“Today, I’m sharing some of the toughest changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of my team by about 13% and let over 11,000 talented employees of we’re gone,” CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post today.
“We’re also taking some additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending the hiring freeze through Q1,” Zuckerberg added. .
Take responsibility for the decisions, Mark Zuckerberg apologizes to Meta employees. “I want to take responsibility for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this has been difficult for everyone and I’m especially sorry for those affected,” he said.
Zuckerberg said he anticipates that an increase in e-commerce and web traffic during the Covid lockdown will be part of a permanent acceleration. “But the downturn in macroeconomics, increased competition, and lost ads made our revenue much lower than expected. I was wrong.”
Like severance, employees will receive 16 weeks of base pay along with two additional weeks for each year of service. The company said employees will be covered for six months of health care costs.
The layoffs will be Facebook’s first major budget cuts since the company was founded in 2004. The cuts reflect a sharp decline in revenue from digital advertising, the economy is teetering on the brink of recession, and Mark Zuckerberg is heavily invested in a speculative virtual reality push known as the metaverse.
In his statement, Zuckerberg emphasized about the need to become more capital efficient, and said the company will shift resources to “high-priority growth areas” such as AI discovery, advertising and business platforms, as well as the metaverse project. mine.
Meta’s job cuts follow cuts at Twitter last week, which saw the company cut about 50% of its workforce after selling to Elon Musk. Those layoffs were chaotic, with many employees discovering they were out of work when they were abruptly cut off from Slack or email. Musk said the moves were necessary to prevent losses on social media. He then asked some laid-off workers to come back.
Snap, the creator of rival app Snapchat, is also downsizing, saying in August it would eliminate 20% of its workforce.
