New round of layoffs in Meta affects the company’s business teams

New York () — Facebook’s parent company Meta on Wednesday began cutting employees on its business teams as part of a new round of layoffs previously announced, according to social media posts from affected workers.

Meta employees in the areas of operations, project management, marketing, policy, communications and risk analysis announced on LinkedIn on Wednesday morning that they were laid off.

The company declined to confirm that the cuts had begun, but a Meta spokesperson reminded of the blog post March from CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he announced that the company would lay off 10,000 employees this year, and that affected members of business groups would be notified this month.

Zuckerberg previously said the business teams would be the third and final major round of layoffs. Laid members of Meta’s technology and hiring teams were notified within the past two months. Some minor reductions could continue until the end of 2023, Zuckerberg said in March.

The reduction of 10,000 jobs represents the second major wave of layoffs in Meta in recent months. In November, the company announced that it would cut approximately 13% of its workforce, or 11,000 jobs, in the biggest round of cuts in its history.

In September, Meta had 87,314 employees, according to a values ​​statement. With the 11,000 payroll cuts announced in November and 10,000 in March, the headcount will be reduced to about 66,000 employees — a total reduction of approximately 25% — assuming no new hires.

Meta says the layoffs are part of its “efficiency year” as the company tries to recover from repeated revenue declines, increased competition, concerns about user growth and heavy losses at its Reality division. Labs in the middle of its pivot towards the construction of the so-called metaverse. Zuckerberg took responsibility for overhiring early in the pandemic, when there was strong demand for the company’s products and for online advertising, which slowed somewhat once the world opened up again.

The strategy is bearing its first fruits. Meta’s shares rose last month after the company posted a 3% year-over-year revenue increase in the first three months of 2023, reversing a trend of three straight quarters of revenue declines. Still, profits were down nearly a quarter from the same period a year earlier, and price per ad — an indicator of the health of the company’s core digital advertising business — was also down 17% year-over-year. former.

Zuckerberg said on an earnings call with analysts last month that when Meta began its “efficiency work” late last year, the “business wasn’t doing as well as I wanted it to, but now we’re doing more and more of this work since a position of strength.”

However, in its wake are the thousands of employees affected by the layoffs.

“Finding a job that you care about and where you already believe the right people to be in the trenches with is an incredible dream, it also makes times like this incredibly difficult,” wrote an employee affected by the layoffs on Wednesday in a LinkedIn post. The employee called the cuts a “shock to the system.”