Facebook parent company Meta will lay off 10,000 additional employees, the company’s billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
This will be the second round of mass dismissals from the tech giant, which laid off 13% percent of the company workforce, or 11,000 employees, last November.
“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Zuckerberg said in a memo to staff. “It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success.” He informed the teams that restructurings and layoffs will be announced in tech groups in late April, and in business groups in late May.
As part of its wider restructuring, the United States-based company also plans to close about 5,000 job postings that have yet to be filled, cancel lower-priority projects and flatten layers of middle management.
In his memo, Zuckerberg told employees he believed the company had suffered “a humbling wake-up call” in 2022 when it experienced a dramatic slowdown in revenue. Zuckerberg cited higher interest rates, geopolitical instability and volatility, and additional regulations as contributing factors to the layoff, saying the company needs to prepare for the “new economic reality” and operate more efficiently.
Big Tech layoffs: Meta’s layoffs are part of a wave of job cuts from the biggest tech companies. In recent months, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and others have also announced workforce reductions. Meta’s layoffs come after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, one of the most prominent banks in the tech industry.
Year of Efficiency: Zuckerberg declared to turn 2023 into the “Year of Efficiency” with the goal to become a better technology company and to improve financial performance in a difficult environment.
Meta says its top investment priority will be advancing artificial intelligence. “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” Zuckerberg said. He explained how AI tools can help users of its apps express themselves creatively and “discover new content,” and can also increase efficiencies internally by helping “engineers write better code faster.”
Metaverse
Despite massive job cuts and a decline in revenue, Meta will continue to spend billions to become a “metaverse company”, connecting people to an immersive digital world through virtual-reality headsets and applications. Building the metaverse “remains central to defining the future of social connection,” Zuckerberg wrote.
What is Metaverse? Facebook’s Metaverse is a futuristic idea of a virtual space that would be shared among users who can interact with each other in real-time via virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. This concept proposes a world where people can come together and engage in various social activities such as attending virtual concerts, playing games, and attending meetings, in a fully immersive and interactive environment.
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