With its stock continuing to fall, Meta Platforms Inc. is planning to cut thousands of workers this week.
Key Details
- Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms is planning a mass layoff spree which will affect thousands of employees.
- Company officials told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week and the job cuts could begin as early as Wednesday, according to people close with the matter.
- This will be Meta’s first boad scale layoff to happen in its 18-year life span.
Why it’s news
Meta Platforms Inc. is joining other large tech companies in laying off a mass amount of employees.
The company is expecting to fire the largest number of employees in its history starting as soon as Wednesday.
Meta’s Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in late October that the company would be shrinking in size as it decides to “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.”
Meta rapidly grew during the pandemic adding a large amount of employees as more people were stuck indoors and doing most things online.
It added more than 27,000 employees in 2020 and 2021 combined, and added a further 15,344 in the first nine months of this year—about one-fourth of that during the most recent quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal writers Jeff Horwitz and Salvador Rodriguez.
But as the pandemic eased up Meta’s stock has dropped considerably falling more than 70% this year alone.
Zuckerberg has put his all into the growing idea of the Metaverse with hopes of it taking off, but it hasn’t happened like he hoped. The company has spent billions on making his dream of the metaverse a reality, but it hasn’t been as easy as he originally thought.
Meta has invested so much money into the Metaverse and it hasn’t paid off. Now the company is having to slash a huge number of employees.
Others slashing employee numbers
Meta isn’t the only company slashing its workforce.
Twitter recently announced that it was cutting 50% of its workforce which ultimately led the company to getting sued.
After announcing his plans of cutting 3,700 employees and being sued from it, Twitter owner Elon Musk has officially gone back on his decision and is attempting to rehire some of the workers that were let go.
The firings were done too fast and some people were let go by mistake, according to people close to the matter.
