Meta to close 5,000 jobs, fire 10,000 workers in 'year of efficiency'

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
15 Mar 2023 10:37

In a blog post, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirms that the plans are meant to move lower-priority projects out of the way and reduce the rates of people hired.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears during a virtual event on Oct. 28, 2021 (AP)

In a second round of layoffs, Meta announced on Tuesday its plans to cut down on 10,000 jobs and remove 5,000 open positions.

In a blog post, co-founder of the Facebook parent company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the plans are meant to move lower-priority projects out of the way and reduce the rates of people hired.

"With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team,” he 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.”

Zuckerberg called 2023 the year of "efficiency," as he believes that the changes mean "a leaner, more technical company" and added, "In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management."

The changes come following 11,000 positions already culled by the company in November 2022 - cutting the workforce by almost 13%. Similar waves of job cuts were witnessed across big tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

As for its shares, last year's issues lowered the company's share prices by two-thirds. The stock later on recovered in 2023. Meta's share prices went up by almost 6% after it announced the latest job cuts.