Mark Zuckerberg confirmed on Wednesday to lay off 13% of its staff which is around 11,000 globally. He wrote down a letter for Meta employees informing about the lay off process starting from Wednesday.
“Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.” Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post.
He said he’d predicted the surge in e-commerce that eventually led to outsized revenue growth. “I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”
He further said that in the new environment it need to become more capital efficient. Meta has shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas – like AI discovery engine, our ads, and business platforms and our long-term vision for the metaverse.