According to a story in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, will announce this week that it will lay off thousands of workers, making it the latest tech company to do so.
The job layoffs may potentially affect “many thousands” of Meta workers, according to the newspaper, which cited persons familiar with the situation as its source. The announcement was anticipated to be made as soon as Wednesday.
According to the article, the company has already told its employees that starting this week, they should cancel any trips that aren’t absolutely necessary.
The New York Times says that the layoffs at the company are likely to be some of the biggest since the business opened in 2004.
For the last several months, Meta has been experiencing financial difficulties, and as a result, the company has been more cost-cutting. The company based in Silicon Valley that is the owner of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger has spent billions of dollars on the developing technology of the metaverse, which is an immersive online world, at a time when the economy of the world as a whole has slowed down and inflation has skyrocketed.
At the same time, digital advertising, which accounts for the majority of Meta’s income, has been suffering as a result of a pullback on the part of advertisers. This trend has had an impact on a variety of social media organizations. The ability of numerous applications to target mobile advertisements to specific users has been hindered as a result of recent privacy modifications implemented by Apple. This has had a negative impact on Meta’s business.
This past month, Meta reported a 50% drop in quarterly earnings and a drop in sales for the second quarter in a row.At the time, the corporation said that it would be “making major adjustments across the board in order to run more effectively,” which would include reducing the size of certain teams and restricting recruiting to the areas of greatest importance.
The revelation that Meta had obtained unsatisfactory results caused the stock price of the firm to suffer a significant loss, dropping by 25 percent in only one day. The market value of the corporation has dropped to $600 billion during the course of the last year.
After seeing a significant halt in growth at Meta, Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced in September his intentions to reorganize teams and decrease manpower for the first time. Mr. Zuckerberg said back then that it was probable that the size of the corporation would be lower in 2023 compared to 2022.
As of the 30th of September, Meta had more than 87,000 employees spread throughout its many platforms around the globe. Its shares have dropped by 73% so far this year, and the layoffs will contribute to the growing number of job losses in Silicon Valley.
Following the successful completion of Elon Musk’s US$44 billion (S$62 billion) acquisition of Twitter, the social media network let off over 3,700 employees the previous week. Lyft, a ride-hailing company, and Seagate Technology Holdings, a company that makes hard drives, are two examples of other businesses that have either cut their staff or said they plan to do so.
Because the economy is “in an uncertain position,” Amazon said on Thursday that the company has made the decision to stop further corporate hiring. This action is in addition to a freeze that was put in place by the e-commerce behemoth the previous month, when it froze corporate and technical recruiting in its retail division for the remainder of the year.
