Days after Twitter laid off a significant number of employees across verticals, Facebook owner Meta will also start firing employees on Wednesday. According to Bloomberg quoting people familiar with the matter, the layoffs are part of a plan to reduce costs at Meta following disappointing earnings and a drop in revenue.
The report said employees who are affected will be told starting Wednesday morning and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg spoke to executives on Tuesday to prepare them for the cuts.
According to Insider, the job cuts at Meta are likely to affect about 10 per cent of the company, which employed more than 87,000 as of September 30. The reductions, part of the first major budget cut since the founding of Facebook in 2004, reflect a sharp slowdown in digital advertising revenue, an economy wobbling on the brink of recession and Zuckerberg’s heavy investment in a speculative virtual-reality push called the metaverse.
In a Q&A session with employees in September, Zuckerberg said, “This is obviously a different mode than we’re used to operating in… For the first 18 years of the company, we basically grew quickly basically every year, and then more recently our revenue has been flat to slightly down for the first time. So, we have to adjust.”
Microblogging site Twitter earlier this week laid off employees in India across engineering, sales& marketing, and communications teams. Twitter India’s communications team was laid off. A large number of Twitter India’s marketing team was also laid off.
The layoffs are part of a global job cut ordered by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk to attain economies of scale and make the $44-billion acquisition viable. Musk took over the company recently and fired its CEO Parag Agrawal, its CFO and some other top executives.
According to a recent Bloomberg report, Twitter has been sued over Elon Musk’s plan to eliminate about 3,700 jobs at the social-media platform, which workers say the company is doing without enough notice in violation of federal and California law. A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday in San Francisco federal court.
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