Barely four days after Elon Musk laid off nearly 50 percent of 7,500-strong staff of Twitter, Meta, the parent body of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has laid off 11,000 workers, about 13% of its entire workforce.
In a message to his employees, Mark Zuckerberg stated that he was reducing the size of the team in the most difficult changes he’s made in Meta’s history.
He expressed his regret at arriving at such decision, and apologized to those who will be affected by the new decision.
Zuckerberg’s message to the affected employees laid off partly reads: “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.
“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.
“At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. 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.
“In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient. We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse.
“We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go”, it added.
On compensation for the affected staff in the US, Zuckerberg stated that the management would pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap as severance; pay for all remaining PTO time; everyone impacted will receive their November 15, 2022 RSU vesting; and cover the cost of healthcare for people and their families for six months as health insurance.
Other benefits include, provision of three months of career support with an external vendor, including early access to unpublished job leads for career services and that the company’s management had dedicated immigration specialists to help guide the affected staff on immigration support based on their personal and family needs.
Zuckerberg promised that outside the US, support will be similar and the management will follow up soon with separate processes that take into account local employment laws.
