Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has announced plans to cut another 10,000 jobs.
Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that it would lay off 10,000 more jobs and institute a hiring freeze as part of a “Year of Efficiency”.
Meta layoffs come less than six months after the company cut 11,000 roles, or 13% of its workforce, in November last year.
In the post announcing Meta layoffs, Zuckerberg said the restructuring was “to improve organizational efficiency, dramatically increase developer productivity and tooling, optimize distributed work, garbage collect unnecessary processes and more.”
He described last year as a “humble wake-up call”, illustrating Meta’s growth slowed last year due to global economic changes and growing competitive pressures. “We’ll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction,” he said, predicting that difficulties will continue for several years due to rising interest rates, geopolitical instability and increased regulation.
Ongoing downsizing at tech companies
Many jobs are disappearing in the social media industry. It is because digital advertising, a source of revenue for many tech companies, is declining due to the widespread economic turmoil following the Pandemic. A decrease in investment due to rising interest rates has also encouraged tech companies to restructure.
Twitter announced layoff plans in November, cutting about 50% of its workforce, shortly after being acquired by Elon Musk in late October last year. Musk said that by January of this year, Twitter’s staff had shrunk to 2,300. Since then, Twitter has been experiencing several unexpected problems.
Snap, the parent company of the social media platform Snapchat, has laid off 20% of its employees. Approximately 1200 employees were affected by these layoffs.
Besides social media companies, tech giants like Google and Amazon recently laid off tens of thousands of workers. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced in January that it would cut 12,000 jobs. It is the largest ever in the company’s history. Amazon began laying off employees last November, and its CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo that it would cut 18,000 roles.