Ahead of the holiday season, Meta has announced that they will layoff 11,000 employees which equates to 13% of the company’s total staff, according to an official announcement made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” said Zuckerberg. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”
Zuckerberg said the company would now become “leaner and more efficient” by cutting spending and staff, and shift more resources to “a smaller number of high priority growth areas,” including ads, AI, and the metaverse, and later added hat the company’s recruiting team would be particularly “disproportionately affected” by the cuts.