Meta to lay off 10,000 employees, Zuckerberg says

Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, plans to lay off 10,000 workers and close 5,000 open roles after making cuts in the company’s workforce in November, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

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The layoffs, which are expected to begin on Wednesday, will impact the company’s recruiting team, tech groups and business groups, Zuckerberg said in a statement shared with employees and posted on Facebook,

“In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes,” he said. “Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.”

Zuckerberg said the cuts are part of the company’s “Year of Efficiency,” in which Meta aims to become “a better technology company” and “to improve our financial performance in a difficult environment so we can execute our long term vision.” As part of the effort, the company plans to trim its management hierarchy and cancel low-priority projects to make “every organization as lean as possible,” according to the CEO.

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Zuckerberg said Monday. “It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success. They’ve dedicated themselves to our mission and I’m personally grateful for all their efforts. We will support people in the same ways we have before and treat everyone with the gratitude they deserve.”

Members of Meta’s recruiting team are expected to learn their employment statuses on Wednesday, with tech group members seeing layoffs in April and business groups seeing cuts in May.

The planned layoffs come after Meta cut 11,000 jobs — or 13% of its workforce — in November. In February, the company posted lower fourth-quarter profit and revenue, marking its third consecutive quarter of revenue decline, The Associated Press reported.

“For most of our history, we saw rapid revenue growth year after year and had the resources to invest in many new products. But last year was a humbling wake-up call,” Zuckerberg said Monday. “At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.”

Hundreds of other technology companies have announced layoffs since the start of the year, affecting more than 120,000 workers, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks job cuts in the tech sector. In January, Google slashed 12,000 roles, Microsoft announced plans to lay off 10,000 workers and Amazon said it would be cutting 18,000 jobs.

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