Meta Cutting Another 10,000 Jobs Due to ‘New Economic Reality’

Meta plans to lay off another 10,000 employees after cutting 11,000 jobs in November.

The company will also freeze hiring for another 5,000 roles that had been open, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Tuesday (March 14) post on the company’s website.

These additional reductions follow the 11,000 layoffs Meta announced in November. Those job cuts accounted for 13% of the company’s workforce at the time and were the first wide-ranging layoffs in its history.

Zuckerberg said Nov. 9 that those cuts were driven by online returning to prior trends after having increased during the pandemic.

The latest round of cuts are part of a restructuring plan that includes flattening Meta’s organizations, canceling lower priority projects, slowing hiring rates and reducing the size of the recruiting team, according to Zuckerberg’s March update.

“We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted,” Zuckerberg said. “We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April and then our business groups in late May. In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes.”

In the post, Zuckerberg also outlined some principles that he said will guide the company in making Meta “an even stronger technology company.”

The principles include removing multiple layers of management and giving managers as many as 10 direct reports, canceling projects that are duplicative or of lower value, making every organization leaner, building an optimal ratio of engineers to other roles, investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and other tools and studying the effectiveness of a distributed workforce, Zuckerberg said.

Meta will also focus on profitability at a time of a changing world economy, growing competitive pressures and slowing growth, Zuckerberg said.

“At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years,” Zuckerberg said. “Higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation. Given this outlook, we’ll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success.”