Now Meta plans to lay off ‘thousands’ of employees this week: Report

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San Francisco, Nov 7 (IANS) After mass layoffs at Twitter, it is another Big Tech company’s turn as the Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta is reportedly set to lay off ‘thousands’ of employees this week.

The “large-scale” job cuts, to begin from Wednesday, could affect “thousands” of workers, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

“Social-media company’s planned cuts expected to affect many thousands of its workforce. The planned layoffs would be the first broad head-count reductions to occur in the company’s 18-year history,” the report, citing sources, said late on Sunday.

The Facebook and Instagram parent company reported over 87,000 employees (as of September).

The company declined to comment, referring to Zuckerberg’s recent statement that the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.”

In June, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox warned employees of “serious times”, saying that the workers must “execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth”.

During the company’s earnings call last month, Zuckerberg said: “In 2023, we’re going to 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. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organisation than we are today,” he had mentioned.

Meta posted another quarterly revenue decline in Q3 as investors began to lose faith in its loss-making, billion-dollars metaverse dream.

In the third quarter (Q3), Meta’s revenue declined 4 per cent year over year to hit $27.7 billion. This decline was owing to Meta’s huge losses in Reality Labs, Meta’s virtual reality division, which lost $3.672 billion in Q3.

Meta investors have called on the company to reduce its workforce by at least 20 per cent and stop making investments in metaverse.