Facebook parent Meta announces to lay off 10,000 workers, won't fill 5,000 open jobs

Facebook-parent Meta Platforms has become the first big tech firm to declare a second round of mass layoffs. On Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced 10,000 job cuts, just four months after it let go 11,000 employees. META will not fill 5,000 open positions as the social media pioneer cuts costs.

The company said Tuesday it will reduce the size of its recruiting team and make further cuts in its tech groups in late April, and then its business groups in late May. The company announced 11,000 job cuts in November.

Here is what Zuckerberg said

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a post that overall “we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.” The company has said that in its “Year of Efficiency”, the company aims to make itself “a better technology company and to improve our financial performance in a difficult environment so we can execute our long-term vision.” Outlining the “timeline” of its restructuring going forward, Zuckerberg said over the next couple of months, organisation leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening “our orgs, cancelling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates.

“With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted. We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May," Zuckerberg said.

"In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes. Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details,” he said.

He added that “In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organisation flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors. We’ll also have individual contributors report into almost every level — not just the bottom — so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster.” He said that for most of the company’s history, it saw rapid revenue growth year after year and had the resources to invest in many new products.

“But last year was a humbling wake-up call. The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably. We scaled back budgets, shrunk our real estate footprint, and made the difficult decision to lay off 13 per cent of our workforce.” In November 2022, the firm let go of 11,000 staff members.

Noting that at this point, “we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.” Higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation, he said.

"Given this outlook, we’ll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success," he said.

In early trading, Meta shares rose 6%.