Meta Plans to Commence Large-scale Layoffs This Week are Underway
According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, Meta, the parent corporation that owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, is anticipated to begin major layoffs as soon as this week.
Although the precise number of the approximately 87,000 people at Meta who will lose their employment is unknown, the current report states that it will be in the “thousands.”
With more than 2 billion users on WhatsApp and over 2.7 billion on Facebook, Meta has a huge worldwide audience. According to the Wall Street Journal, the corporation had really been on a hiring binge over the previous three years, with over 37,000 new workers since the start of 2020.
The company, which recently changed its name to Meta in an effort to concentrate on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for the metaverse, will be making the first major layoffs in its history as a result of the decision. The product creators for Meta, however, reportedly don’t even want to use the metaverse, thus that vision hasn’t been carried out very successfully. According to the Wall Street Journal, the majority of visitors who visit Horizon Worlds don’t come back.
It was reported in September that Meta intended to decrease costs by around 10%, although it’s unclear how much of that would be accomplished through reducing headcount.
When it was still called Facebook in September 2021, Meta had a market cap of almost $1 trillion. Only $240 billion is the company’s current market value.
In the past few weeks, there have been a number of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, including those at Stripe, which let go 14% of its 8,100 employees, and Twitter, which let go roughly 50% of its staff after Elon Musk became CEO. Significant personnel reductions have also recently occurred at Netflix, Spotify, and Shopify.
Despite having a low unemployment rate, the United States has seen rising inflation, much like the rest of the world, which has made businesses fear that a recession may be on the horizon. In an effort to increase unemployment among Americans, the Federal Reserve has been hiking interest rates on the grounds that doing so will reduce inflation.
