PARIS —
Facebook owner Meta will lay off more than 11,000 of its staff in “the most
difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history”, boss
Mark Zuckerberg said on
Wednesday.
اضافة اعلان
He said the cuts
represented 13 percent of the social media titan’s workforce and would affect
its research lab focusing on the metaverse as well as its apps, which include
Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp.
The tech industry
is in a serious slump and several major firms have announced mass layoffs
—Twitter’s new owner
Elon Musk fired half its staff last week.
“I want to take
accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” Zuckerberg said in
a note to staff. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry
to those impacted.”
Ad-supported
platforms such as Facebook and Google are suffering with advertisers looking to
cut costs as they struggle with inflation and rising interest rates.
Zuckerberg told
staff he had expected the boost in e-commerce and online activity during the
COVID pandemic to continue, but added: “I got this wrong, and I take
responsibility for that.”
Metaverse woes
The downturn has affected companies across the sector, with Apple and
Amazon also recently announcing results that disappointed investors.
But Meta also
faces some unique problems of its own.
Investors have
been worried about Zuckerberg’s decision to devote billions of dollars to
developing the metaverse, an immersive version of the web accessed via virtual
reality headsets.
Zuckerberg
renamed the company to
Meta a year ago to reflect the commitment to the
project, but the division working on metaverse technology has since made losses
of more than $3.5 billion.
He has hinted
several times this year that belt-tightening measures were just around the
corner and said in his letter on Wednesday that staff layoffs were a “last
resort”.
Meta would also
keep a hiring freeze going into next year, he said, and other spending cuts
were envisaged.
“Fundamentally,
we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than
we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re
operating efficiently,” he wrote.
Last month, Meta
announced profits of $4.4 billion in the third quarter, a 52 percent decrease
year-on-year, causing its stock price to fall 25 percent.
The slump in profits
comes despite its platforms dominating the world in terms of users — Facebook
alone claims to have around two billion people who log on daily.
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