It is truly a bad time to be employed by a social media company at the moment. The Wall Street Journal reports that Twitter has already been hit with mass layoffs, now it’s Meta’s turn to go through more massive layoffs, as a new report from the news outlet reports. Facebook’s parent company, on the other hand, seems to be doing more than what its bird rival is doing with thousands of possible cutoffs that are on the horizon.
Reports have surfaced in recent days that layoffs could take place as early as Wednesday this week, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Thousands of Facebook employees may be laid off
Earlier this month, Meta reported over 87,000 employees, but these mass layoffs are expected to take a significant chunk of that figure off, cutting off a significant part of that figure at the end of September. This report, also published by the WSJ, claims that the job cuts at Twitter are expected to be much larger than those at the company’s rival Facebook, which affected about half of the firm’s 7500 employees.
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This move was hinted at by Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, back in June of this year when he warned employees of “serious times” and an environment of slower growth, warning them to work flawlessly in an environment such as this.
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerburg was far more direct when it came to the company’s position on the issue. According to a transcript of an internal email obtained by The Verge, the executive told the company’s clients that there were probably a lot of people at the company who shouldn’t be there. The executive also warned that there could be a downsizing in the near future as a result of the hiring freeze.
Thousands of Facebook employees may be laid off
The company’s CEO declined to respond to a request for comment, but he pointed to the statements that he made during last month’s earnings call as an example of what he meant. It is stated in the statement as follows:
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There will be a few areas where we intend to focus our investments in 2023, and these areas will be high priority growth areas. It is therefore expected that some of the teams will grow in a meaningful way, but most of those teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. It’s expected that we’ll have roughly the same size of organization at the end of 2023 or perhaps even be a slightly smaller organization than we are now at the end of 2023.
