-
Meta is expected to announce layoffs for thousands of employees as soon as Wednesday, WSJ reported.
-
The company already started downsizing and cutting expenses in recent months.
-
Meta joins a growing list of tech companies slashing their workforces as a recession nears.
Meta is expected to announce a massive round of layoffs this week, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
The layoffs may impact “many thousands” of staffers and could come as soon as Wednesday, sources told the Journal.
A spokesperson for Meta declined Insider’s request to comment, but instead pointed to recent remarks from CEO Mark Zuckerberg from the company’s third-quarter earnings call which hinted at upcoming downsizing.
“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” he said in October. “So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
Meta employees told Insider’s Kali Hays last month that managers had started asking for “increased intensity” and warned of the possibility of coming layoffs that could be anywhere from 10% to 20% of the company’s workforce.
“Zuck’s message was loud and clear: You have three months to prove your worth, put in 200% effort, or you can resign now if you don’t like it,” one of the workers said.
Meta’s stock plummeted by 20% last month after the company reported worse-than-expected earnings, garnering scrutiny for missteps like spending $4 billion on the metaverse in its most recent quarter.
The layoffs come as a growing list of tech companies begin cutting jobs and many employers brace for a looming economic recession.
On Friday, Twitter laid off an estimated 50% of its staff shortly after Elon Musk took over at the helm. Also last week, Stripe cut 14% of its staffers and Lyft fired 700 employees, while GoFundMe nixed 12% of its team in October, among others.
“It’s going to be a hard time; at the micro level, it will affect a lot of people’s jobs and livelihoods,” Mark Peter Davis, managing partner at Interplay Ventures, told Insider’s Rob Price and Samantha Stokes.
Read the original article on Business Insider
