Blood bath at another social media house as Meta fires 11,000 employees

Washington, Nov 09: Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is laying off 11,000 workers as part of its cost-cutting strategy.

In a letter to employees, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of the company, said the company has decided to reduce the size of the team by about 13 per cent and letting 11,000 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," he said in the letter.

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, he said.

"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," he added.

This comes days after another social media platform Twitter fired over 3,000 employees.

The company, which has over 87,000 employees, has been a powerhouse company for years despite coming under criticism over data privacy issues and toxic content. In 2021, Meta was valued at $1 trillion, but the year 2022 has not been a great year due to a global economic slowdown and a decline in digital advertising, which is the main source of its revenue, according to a report in The New York Times.

According to Zuckerberg, the company is restructuring teams to increase its sefficiency. "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," he said in the letter.

The fired employees will be paid 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap. They will also bare the expenses of healthcare for people and their families for six months apart from providing immigration support and career services.

The company will be freezing hiring in the first quarter of 2023.

In recent weeks, Apple, Intel, Amazon, Stripe and Snap and a few other MNCs have opted for layoffs or freezing new hirings.