Meta Plans To Lay Off Thousands More As Early As This Week: Report

Meta Platforms Inc., the social networking giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, is planning to lay off thousands of workers as early as this week, according to a report.

The additional round of mass layoffs comes months after the company cut 11,000 jobs, about 13% of its workforce, to make it more capital efficient, Bloomberg News reported Monday. The company has been working on flattening its organization by giving buyout packages to the managers and cutting the non-essential teams. However, the new job cuts are driven by financial targets and are independent of the "flattening" attempts, the report said.

The plan for the layoffs that could affect thousands of workers would reportedly be finalized within the week.

In February, The Washington Post reported that Meta had plans for a fresh round of job cuts in the coming months in an attempt to reorganize and downsize the company. The report said that the company planned to push some leaders into lower-level roles without direct reports, flattening the layers of management. In addition to flattening the structure, Meta was also considering more traditional job cuts that included cutting down some projects and jobs in the months ahead.

Meta hired aggressively during the pandemic anticipating rapid growth and continued even after the lockdowns ended. However, the company decided to lay off thousands in November 2022 after its revenue declined for a second consecutive quarter, losing its advertising sales to Tiktok.

"Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I'd expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement after the November layoffs.

The news about Meta's mass layoffs comes as the latest in a series of job cuts announced by several tech companies that hired rapidly during the pandemic. According to estimates, over 97,000 employees in tech companies lost their jobs in 2022.

Google sent out emails to the employees Monday, warning that it would be promoting fewer people to senior roles this year. The announcement came weeks after the multinational tech giant trimmed around 6% of the workforce, laying off 12,000 employees.