Meta Platforms Inc. is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week that will affect thousands of employees, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Sunday citing people familiar with the matter, with an announcement planned as early as Wednesday. Meta declined to comment on the WSJ report. Facebook parent Meta in October forecasted a weak holiday quarter and significantly more costs next year wiping about $67 billion off Meta's stock market value, adding to the more than half a trillion dollars in value already lost this year.
The WSJ added that the layoffs could hit Meta even harder than the mass job cuts at Twitter, which affected about half of the company’s 7,500 workforce.
Earlier in June, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO warned employees that the coming recession would lead to a reduction in engineering jobs by at least 30 percent at the social media company.
A spokesman for Meta declined to comment, referring to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s recent statement that the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.”
“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year,” he said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 26. “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
