Mark Zuckerberg is laying off more than 11,000 Meta employees worldwide.
Meta operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the move will reduce the company’s workforce by 13 percent.
Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief, shared the figures in a message to employees. He revealed the company will also continue its hiring freeze through the first quarter of 2023.
“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,” Zuckerberg said.
The layoffs stem from the company’s move to “significantly increase” its investment during COVID when the world was moving online. Zuckerberg said he, like many others, believed this to be the new norm.
“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” Zuckerberg wrote. Multiple other companies have found themselves in a similar situation, including Shopify.
Impacted employees will be notified through their emails, mimicking Elon Musk’s recent layoff actions at Twitter.
Meta will focus their resources on other areas, including the AI discovery engine and the metaverse, an area that the company has lost money on. According to The Verge, the company lost $9.4 billion on metaverse technology this year alone.
Impacted employees will receive a severance of 16 weeks of pay and two additional weeks for every year they’ve been at the company. It’s not clear if their severance will include a cut of the Metaverse, but as the way things currently stand, let’s hope that’s not the case.
Image credit: Shutterstock
Source: Meta
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