Meta Platforms, the company that owns social networks Facebook and Instagram, will lay off 11,000 workers or about 13 percent of its global workforce, the biggest Big Tech job losses so far following recent cutbacks at Twitter and Stripe.
Recruiting and business teams will bear the brunt of the cuts, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to staff Wednesday. The company will also extend a current hiring freeze into the first quarter of 2023 and will shrink its office space.
Zuckerberg blamed Meta’s outsize growth in investment during the pandemic which anticipated that an upsurge in e-commerce and ad revenue would continue.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote in the statement. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”
The company expects “significant operating losses” next year from its virtual and augmented reality unit Reality Labs, Meta’s big bet on the metaverse, an online virtual world for business and social activities at the heart of Facebook’s rebrand to Meta in October 2021, it said in another statement.
