After Twitter's mass layoffs, Facebook parent company Meta is preparing for big-scale layoffs this week, say reports.
According to reports, this could be one of the largest reductions to date at the major technology corporation.
The Wall Street Journal 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 company officials have told employees to cancel non-urgent travels beginning this week, WSJ reported.
This would be the first planned layoffs conducted in the company's 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," the report said.
The company would focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said.
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, reported PTI. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today, it reported.
During a companywide meeting held at the end of June, it had been reported that Zukerberg had told his employees that probably there are a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be there.
The WSJ reported that Meta had gone on a hiring spree during the pandemic as life and business shifted more online. During the pandemic, Meta added more than 27,000 employees. A further 15,344 employees were also hired in the first nine months of this year.
Meta, whose stock has fallen more than 70 per cent this year, has highlighted deteriorating macroeconomic trends, but investors have also been spooked by its spending and threats to the company's core social-media business.
The report added that much of Meta's ballooning costs stem from Zuckerberg's commitment to Reality Labs, which is a division of the company responsible for virtual- and augmented-reality headsets as well as the creation of the metaverse. Zuckerberg has billed the "metaverse as a constellation of interlocking virtual worlds in which people will eventually work, play, live and shop, the WSJ reported.
The effort has cost the company USD 15 billion since the beginning of last year. But despite investing heavily in promoting its virtual-reality platform, Horizon Worlds, users have been largely unimpressed, it said.
(With inputs from PTI)
