Meta to Begin Mass Layoff this Week

Meta Platforms Inc is expected to announce a mass layoff on Wednesday amid the company’s slow growth and dismal financial results.

Before this, Meta’s shareholder Altimeter Capital Management stated in an open letter to the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to “streamline and focus its path forward,” ultimately encouraging the tech giant to “cut at least 20% of employee-related expenses by January 1, 2023.”

In the tech giant’s report last September, Meta supposedly has more than 87,000 employees. This data indicates that the expected layoffs will affect thousands of employees, marking the company’s first mass staff reduction in its history.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, had lost $3.7 billion over the past three months and had forecasted dim revenue growth. This year, its shares also fell to their lowest since 2016, recording a 73% drop, making the social media giant one of the worst-performing members in the S&P 500 index in 2022.

Meta Refused to Comment on the Expected Mass Layoff

In an email, Meta’s spokesperson Dave Arnold declined to confirm the report regarding the expected mass layoffs but referred to Zuckerberg’s statement in the recent earnings call.

“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas,” Zuckerberg said. “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.”

This news about Meta’s mass layoff came around just days after Elon Musk fired nearly half of Twitter’s staff. The mass layoff affected roughly 7,500 employees, which mainly consisted of professionals and mid-level managers.

However, before Twitter’s mass layoffs on Friday, some laid-off employees sued the social media platform on Thursday, claiming that the company had violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.