Facebook’s parent Meta set to slash thousands of jobs

Meta plans to lay off employees this week, three people with knowledge of the situation said, adding that the job cuts were set to be the most significant at the company since it was founded in 2004.

It was unclear how many people would be cut and in which departments, said the people, who declined to be identified because they were not authorised to speak publicly. The lay-offs were expected by the end of the week. Meta had 87,314 employees at the end of September, up 28 per cent from a year ago.

Meta has been struggling financially for months and has been increasingly clamping down on costs. The Silicon Valley company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, has spent billions of dollars on the emerging technology of the metaverse, an immersive online world, just as the global economy has slowed and inflation has soared.

At the same time, digital advertising — which forms the bulk of Meta’s revenue — has weakened as advertisers have pulled back, affecting many social media companies. Meta’s business has also been hurt by privacy changes that Apple enacted, which have hampered the ability of many apps to target mobile ads to users.

Last month, Meta posted a 50 per cent slide in quarterly profits and its second-straight sales decline. The company said at the time that it would be “making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently”, including by shrinking some teams and by hiring only in its areas of highest priority.

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Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had added that most “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year”. He said the company would “end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organisation than we are today”.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Meta’s plans for lay-offs this week.

Zuckerberg has been signalling tougher times ahead for months. In July, he told employees that the company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and that workers should prepare to do more work with fewer resources. Their performances would also be graded more intensely than previously, he said.