Meta will lead another round of mass layoffs on Wednesday, multiple sources working at the company told Vox.
In an internal memo posted to a Meta employee bulletin board on Tuesday evening and viewed by Vox, the company told employees that the layoffs will begin on Wednesday and will impact a wide range of technical teams, including those working on Facebook. , Instagram, Reality Labs, and WhatsApp. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the memo was sent to employees but declined to comment further. The cuts could be in the order of 4,000 jobs, a source said.
“It will be a difficult time as we say goodbye to the friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta,” Lori Goler, Meta’s people manager, said in the memo.
Meta employees in North America will be notified via email between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. PT Wednesday morning, according to Goler’s memo. Outside of North America, lead times will vary from country to country and some countries will not be affected.
Meta is also asking employees in North America, whose work permits, to work from home on Wednesday to give people “space to process the news.”
The layoffs come after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March that the company would cut another 10,000 jobs in the coming months, having already cut 11,000 in November. Zuckerberg previously said that the cuts in April would impact technology departments, while another round of cuts expected in May will impact the business side of the business. At the end of last year, Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had about 86,000 employees.
Sources spoke with Vox on condition of anonymity due to concerns about professional repercussions.
Meta’s continued layoffs are part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for a “year of efficiency” in 2023. The layoffs are a reminder that after nearly two decades of nearly uninterrupted growth, big tech companies like Meta are now facing a intense period of cutbacks and austerity measures. Silicon Valley as a whole has gone through an economic downturn that has dramatically changed what was once considered a spendthrift work culture. Long gone are the days of unlimited perks, travel, and nonstop hiring. And over the past year, nearly every major tech company has gone through rounds of layoffs. The meta have was particularly painfulthe company issuing the cuts in waves.
“It will be difficult and there is no getting around it,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post last month. “Over the next two months, organizational leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our organizations, canceling lower priority projects and reducing our hiring rates.”
While the the stock market reacted well to Meta’s layoffs last year, employee morale suffered. Vox reported in January that internal employee sentiment surveys on optimism and confidence in corporate leadership were the lowest they had been in recent memory. Several sources described working in a state of uncertainty for the past few months and finding it difficult to move the work forward.
“I think people are fed up with all of this and ignore it now,” said a Meta employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. They added that it’s ‘too stressful to keep worrying about when there’s nothing you can do about it’
Meta’s next round of cuts show that this isn’t the end of tech layoffs, it’s just the start of the next wave.
Update, April 18, 2023, 10:05 p.m. ET: This article has been updated with more details about the layoffs shared with Meta employees on Tuesday evening.