Thousands may be laid off at Meta this week

Meta, which is Facebook’s parent company, is all set to lay off thousands of employees this week.

As per Wall Street Journal, a formal announcement will happen within two days.

In October, Meta predicted a weak holiday season and higher costs for the coming year. The Company’s profits dipped 52 per cent in Q3, and stood at $4.4 billion. Its market value has also fallen to $600 billion in the past one year.

Meta’s workforce strength, as of 30 September, was about 87,000, globally, across WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.

Mark Zuckerberg, however, has been openly talking of the need to cut down on expenditure and slow down on hiring. He had said that the coming year will be focussed on investing on growth areas. He had indicated that while some teams may grow, others may reduce in size.

While an official figure is yet to be revealed, it is speculated that thousands may be rendered jobless at Meta in this layoff round.

In September, Bloomberg had reported that Zuckerberg, had communicated to the workforce his intentions to restructure certain groups in the social-media company and freeze hiring. He had at the time left it to the individual teams to decide how they would want to plan changes in team size and work with their limited budgets.

The objective was to cut costs and budgets across the organisation. Zuckerberg had indicated that the Company and the tech space, in general, was going through one of the worst recessions, and therefore, there was a need to slow hiring. He had also indicated that the Company had many people and roles that were redundant. Earlier this year, the social-media company had even reduced hiring of engineers by 30 per cent.