Meta Rumoured To Announce 'Large-Scale' Layoffs Next Week

Facebook's parent company Meta may announce significant layoffs as early as next week.

The company intends to lay off "many thousands" of workers, and an announcement might be made as early as Wednesday according to The Wall Street Journal. 

At the moment, Meta employs more than 87,000 people. The layoffs made by Twitter on Friday may not be the biggest employment reduction carried out by a digital business this year.

The reductions would also mark the first significant reorganisation in Meta's history.

A spokeswoman cited a comment made by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the most recent Q3 earnings call for the business.

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

"So that means some teams will grow meaningfully but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year,” he said. 

“In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”

The Journal notes that during the first two years of the coronavirus epidemic, Meta had considerable growth, hiring more than 27,000 new workers in 2020 and 2021.

The business continued its hiring binge through the first nine months of 2022, during which time it hired 15,344 more people.

Although the corporation benefited greatly from the pandemic, its situation has changed recently.

The business announced its first-ever decline in revenue in July.

The business has attributed its recent difficulties to TikTok's fierce competition as well as the introduction of Apple's disputed App Tracking Transparency feature.

At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to purchase the Metaverse has cost the corporation a lot of money while so far not generating any new revenue potential.

With little success, Meta has spent $15 billion since the beginning of 2021 trying to popularise augmented and virtual reality.

In 2023, the business anticipates further project losses.