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Meta is about to start its next round of layoffs

The company plans to lay off employees on Wednesday, according to sources.
Mark Zuckerberg leaving a federal courthouse in San Jose in February 2022. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg leaving a federal courthouse in San Jose in February 2022. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Shirin Ghaffary is a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.

Meta will conduct another mass round of layoffs on Wednesday, several sources working at the company told Vox.

In an internal memo posted to a Meta employee message board on Tuesday evening and viewed by Vox, the company told employees that the layoffs will start on Wednesday and will impact a wide range of technical teams including those working on Facebook, Instagram, Reality Labs, and WhatsApp. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the memo was sent to employees but declined to comment further. The cuts could be in the range of 4,000 jobs, one source said. 

“This will be a difficult time as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta,” Lori Goler, Meta’s head of people, said in the memo. 

Do you work at Meta and have thoughts about what’s going on at the company? You can send us a tip at shirin.ghaffary@protonmail.com. We can grant requests for anonymity if needed. Signal number available upon request.

Meta employees in North America will be notified by email between 4 am to 5 am PT Wednesday morning, according to Goler’s note. Outside of North America, the timelines will vary country to country, and some countries will not be impacted.

Meta is also asking employees in North America, whose job allow it, to work from home on Wednesday to give people “space to process the news.”

The layoffs come after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March that the company would cut 10,000 more jobs in the coming months, after already cutting 11,000 in November. Zuckerberg previously said that cuts in April would impact tech departments, while another planned round of cuts in May will impact the business side of the company. At the end of last year, Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, had around 86,000 employees.

Sources spoke with Vox on the condition of anonymity because of concern about professional repercussions.

Do you work at Meta and have thoughts about what’s going on at the company? You can send us a tip at shirin.ghaffary@protonmail.com. We can grant requests for anonymity if needed. Signal number available upon request.

Meta’s continued layoffs are part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for a “year of efficiency” in 2023. The layoffs are a reminder that after nearly two decades of almost uninterrupted growth, major tech companies like Meta are now undergoing an intense period of cutbacks and belt-tightening measures. Silicon Valley as a whole has been going through an economic downturn that has drastically changed what was once considered a free-spending work culture. Long gone are the days of unlimited perks, travel, and nonstop hiring. And in the past year, almost every major tech company has had rounds of layoffs. Meta’s have been particularly painful, with the company issuing the cuts in waves.

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post last month. “Over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates.”

While the stock market responded well to Meta’s layoffs last year, employee morale has suffered. Vox reported in January that internal employee sentiment surveys about optimism and confidence in leadership at the company were the lowest they had been in recent memory. Several sources described working in a state of limbo for the past few months and that it’s hard to get any work done.

“I think people are getting tired of all this and are just ignoring this now,” said one Meta employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. They added that it’s “too stressful to keep worrying when you can’t do anything about it”

Meta’s next round of cuts shows that this isn’t the end of tech layoffs, it’s only the beginning of the next wave. 

Update, April 18, 2023, 10:05 pm ET: This article has been updated with further details about the layoffs shared with Meta employees on Tuesday evening.

Author: Editors Desk

Source: Vox

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