Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, has confirmed to executives that the company will begin laying off employees on Wednesday morning, November 9 at 6am US time, according to reports. The layoffs at Meta come just days after Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk cut the company’s workforce by half following his acquisition of the social media site.
Zuckerberg addressed several executives at the company on Tuesday morning and mentioned that recruiting and business teams would be impacted by the layoffs. Zuckerberg added that he was responsible for the company’s downturn, with overoptimism about growth leading to overstaffing. Meta’s head of human resources, Lori Goler, said employees who lose their jobs will be provided a severance package consisting of at least four months of salary, reports added.
The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that the layoffs at Meta, which has more than 87,000 employees, are expected to affect "many thousands of employees" and could come as soon as Wednesday. The WSJ report said that company officials have told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week.
“The planned layoffs would be the first broad head-count reductions to occur in the company’s 18-year history. While smaller on a percentage basis than the cuts at Twitter Inc. this past week, which hit about half of that company’s staff, the number of Meta employees expected to lose their jobs could be the largest to date at a major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech-industry retrenchment," it said.
Zuckerberg has said that the company would “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,” Zuckerberg had said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call last month. “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today. Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg had told employees at a companywide meeting at the end of June.