Mark Zuckerberg will follow Elon Musk’s lead and begin firing off many Meta staff as soon as tomorrow.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg informed executives that extensive layoffs would be disclosed, with recruiting and business teams among those affected.
Employees will be notified of the layoffs via a company-wide email on Wednesday at 6 a.m. Eastern time.
Cuts at the firm, which has seen its market value plummet and sales collapse by 70%, are expected to affect thousands of employees.
Many new engineers hired to work on the contentious Metaverse during the last two years are set to be let go, according to individuals familiar with the situation.
Zuckerberg, 38, was believed to have seemed glum and claimed responsibility for Meta’s mistakes.
He also claimed that the firm was overstaffed because he was excessively hopeful about its expansion.
Lori Goler, Meta’s head of human resources, employees who are let go would be given at least four months’ pay as severance.
The confirmation of the job losses followed mounting anticipation that Meta was about to announce major workforce cutbacks of up to 10%.
According to Gene Munster, a managing partner at Loup, which invests in Meta, the personnel reduction would be the most significant by any big tech company in 2022.
Details about Meta’s plans come after Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, fired half of its employees, or around 3,750 people, last week, becoming the second digital company to do so.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, employs around 87,000 people, so a 10% reduction would more than double the manpower lost by Twitter.
Many Twitter workers were informed that their roles had been terminated when their access to business networks such as Slack and email was unexpectedly removed.
The contentious action by Twitter was followed by a stunning U-turn as management realized that hundreds of the sacked staff could be required to construct the new features for Musk’s short-form online platform.
The firm still employs around 3,700 people. Musk is pressuring those who remain to work swiftly to design and execute new features.
The company’s app section is scheduled to be overhauled, according to posts in the Meta employee-only community on Fishbowl, a work-focused social site.
According to people familiar with the Fishbowl website, Meta’s marketing division, partnership department, and HR staff “will be harder impacted than others.”
Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call in late October: ‘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 October, Zuckerberg stated that he anticipated the company to remain “about the same size” towards the end of 2023, implying that some positions may be restored following the layoffs.
Meta is expected to start another recruiting drive next year, this time focusing on its Reality Labs division, which is in charge of the Metaverse.
Meta has forecasted a bad Christmas quarter and much higher costs next year, erasing around $67 billion from Meta’s stock market worth, adding to the more than $500 billion in value already lost this year.
The dismal forecast comes as Meta deals with decreasing global economic development, TikTok competition, Apple privacy reforms, worries about large spending on the metaverse, and the ever-present prospect of regulation.
Meta has made a massive bet on its Metaverse becoming the next major frontier of the technology sector, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg pouring more than $36 billion into a project many perceive to be failing thus far.
The CEO has already seen more than $30 billion of that money vanish in months, while his net worth – which is heavily linked to his company’s valuation – has been said to have dropped by $88 billion.
The business is expected to reach 500,000 users of its virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds, by the end of 2022, according to papers obtained by the WSJ.
At the time of writing, the figure was fewer than 200,000, remaining well short of the revised goal of 280,000 by the end of 2022. The records also indicated that the bulk of those 200,000 people leave the system after only one visit, with many claiming that most regions are devoid of other users.
Meanwhile, according to CNBC, Meta’s Reality Labs business unit manages its VR and AR efforts and has already lost $9.4 billion in 2022.
According to Meta, these losses will ‘increase dramatically year over year.’ ‘Beyond 2023, we plan to schedule Reality Labs investments so that we may accomplish our long-term aim of increasing total company operating profitability,’ Meta stated last month.