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Another 10,000 Meta employees will lose their jobs, Mark Zuckerberg has announced, and the company will close around 5,000 roles they were hiring for. The cuts come just months after Meta, Facebook’s parent company, laid off 11,000 employees.
Zuckerberg offered the news in a Facebook post updating readers on what he’s calling their “Year of Efficiency”. The cuts won’t happen all at once, but will roll out across departments through March, April and May, and “in a small number of cases” between now and the end of the year. At its peak last year, Meta employed around 87,000 employees globally.
The layoffs are a response to the same economic challenges as last year’s cuts, according to Zuckerberg.
“At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years,” he writes. “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. Given this outlook, we’ll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success.”
Near the end of the post, he takes time to mention the latest tech company gold rush: AI. “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products. We have the infrastructure to do this at unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it enables will be amazing,” he writes. I look forward to ChatGPT-generated chain letters and viral video captions coming to the Facebook content feed soon.
The metaverse also “remains central”, Zuckberg writes, despite Meta already sinking billions of dollars into the project each year, and despite it being a terrible idea seemingly no one wants.