Meta is reportedly laying off 11,000 employees before the end of this year. Here is everything you need to know.
After the mega wave of firings from Elon Musk’s Twitter, it is now Mark Zuckerberg who is preparing to do the same. In a report that appeared recently, Meta Platforms will lay off 13 percent of its workforce this year. In simpler numbers, that means Facebook owner Meta will ask 11,000 of his employees to go. The reason behind the mass layoff is to accommodate sky-high costs as well as a weak advertising market.
This is the largest wave of layoffs in the 18-year history of Meta, which originally started as Facebook. Recently, Elon Musk did the same thing with his newly acquired Twitter, in which employees around the world were laid off. The same thing happened with Microsoft a while ago.
The reason behind the sudden layoff is lower returns from decades-high inflation and higher interest rates. During the COVID-induced lockdown, these tech companies enjoyed a surge in their valuations.
Meta has also said it plans to cut discretionary spending. It will also extend its hiring freeze through the first quarter. Meta has been hiring a lot of staff in recent years to improve their experiences on Facebook and all of their other platforms. Facebook had gotten a fact-checking team to prevent the spread of fake news.
Meta’s firing could dwarf the mass firing at Twitter. Elon Musk, after taking over Twitter, had fired former CEO Parag Agarwal and the top management of the company. Since then, Musk had hired a couple of new people to help get Twitter back on track.