It is truly a bad time to be working for social media companies. First, it was Twitter and now it’s Meta’s turn to go through a round of mass layoffs, says a new report from The Wall Street Journal. However, it seems that Facebook’s parent company is going above and beyond its bird rival with thousands of possible cut-offs.
Sources familiar with the matter have reported that the layoffs could begin as soon as Wednesday this week.
Social media giant Meta reported over 87,000 employees by the end of September, but these mass layoffs are expected to cut off a significant portion of this figure. The report from WSJ says that these mass job cuts are expected to be much bigger than its rival company Twitter, which affected about half of the brand’s 7500-employee workforce.
Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox hinted at this move back in June this year, warning employees of “serious times” and that they must “execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth.”
Company CEO Mark Zuckerburg was far more direct about Facebook’s approach on the matter. An internal Q&A session obtained by The Verge showed that the executive said “there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.” He also halted hirings around two months ago and warned that the company could downsize in the near future.
He declined a request to comment but pointed to one of his statements shared during the company’s earnings call last month. The statement says:
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. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.
