The company Meta, which combines the social networks Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, will fire another 10,000 employees, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced. It is a new big layoff after 11,000 people were laid off last November.
Zuckerberg announced in an email to employees that they would be laid off “over the next few months.” They will primarily lay off middle management, i.e. executives without the most important executive functions.
“We must prepare for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years to come,” Zuckerberg wrote in the message. Meta also canceled plans to hire 5,000 people.
Layoffs have been announced in recent months by a number of major tech companies, such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Big American bankers such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are also laying off.
The tech industry has laid off nearly 290,000 workers since the start of 2022, about 40 percent of them this year, according to layoffs.fyi, a job-tracking website.
One of the key reasons, according to analysts, is the drop in advertising revenue, as the biggest advertisers are burdened by high inflation and rising interest rates.
In addition, Zuckerberg admitted last year that he was wrong to count on the boom in online shopping and other online activities even after the covid-19 pandemic. In addition, the company devoted several billion dollars to the development of metaverses or parallel realities.
However, the director estimates that 2023 will be the “year of efficiency”, and after the layoffs, the annual costs should be between 86 and 92 billion dollars instead of between 89 and 95 billion.
After November, it is only the second major dismissal of Meta or of Facebook in its 18-year history. At the end of 2022, the company employed 86,482 people, which is 20 percent more than a year before. In November last year, the company fired 11,000 workers, which at the time represented a tenth of the workforce.
Source: Rtvslo
