Meta fires another 10,000 employees, CEO Zuckerberg says new hiring will resume after layoffs complete

By Ankita GargMeta has announced another round of layoffs in 2023. Last year, the company fired as many as 11,000 employees and it is now all set to sack 10,000 more workers. Meta has announced the latest layoff news in a blog post and the tech giant has also apologized for its latest decision. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg also confirmed that restructurings and layoffs in tech groups will be done in late April, and business groups will be affected in late May.

“Over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates. With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted,” he said in an email sent to laid-off Meta employees.

The CEO has also revealed that the tech giant will also eliminate 5,000 open roles in the coming months. He asserted that the layoff process will continue until the end of the year because firings at different levels and regions will take time. The company didn’t reveal details about severance packages for impacted Meta employees.

“In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes. Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired,” the CEO said.

Is Meta having financial issues?

In the official email, Zuckerberg suggested that Meta is having financial issues and that the company plans to use resources efficiently to improve business and achieve better results. He revealed that Meta witnessed high growth before 2022, but the company struggled in terms of revenue after its growth slowed down and competition increased.

“Operating our business more efficiently will give us the resources and confidence to achieve our long-term vision by delivering sustainable financial results that make us an attractive company to work at and invest in. For most of our history, we saw rapid revenue growth year after year and had the resources to invest in many new products. But last year was a humbling wake-up call. The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably. We scaled back budgets, shrunk our real estate footprint, and made the difficult decision to lay off 13 percent of our workforce,” he said.

Meta plans to resume fresh firings after layoffs are done

This might come as a shock to many, considering the tech company is firing plenty of employees. In the past few months, Meta fired 11,000 employees and it will layoff 10,000 people in the coming months. Zuckerberg has clearly stated in the email that once Meta is done with layoffs, it will be lifting hiring and transfer freezes in groups.

“After restructuring, we plan to lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group. Other relevant efficiency timelines include targeting this summer to complete our analysis from our hybrid work year of learning so we can further refine our distributed work model. We also aim to have a steady stream of developer productivity enhancements and process improvements throughout the year.

Tech layoffs in 2023

While layoffs have been happening in the tech industry since last year, 2023 has turned out to be worse for many people. Several big tech companies have been firing thousands of employees in the name of saving cost and restricting teams. Some companies have told laid-off employees that layoffs have been done on the basis of performance, but it has been discovered that even top performers were eliminated.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the layoff of 10,000 employees, whereas Google sacked 12,000 workers. Amazon also eliminated as many as 18,000 jobs. There were also reports of Twitter removing more people. In 2022, the social media platform removed more than 60 percent of employees, as per reports. The only good thing is that the tech companies promised to offer good severance packages to impacted employees.