Meta, which owns Facebook, is laying off 13% of its employees in an effort to restructure its business and cut costs.
Meta, the company that owns the social media site Facebook, will cut more than 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of its staff, CEO Mark Zuckerburg said on Wednesday.
Zuckerburg said that the move was one of the “most difficult” in the company’s history, which will see Meta take other steps “to become a leaner and more efficient company.”
In a message to employees, Zuckerberg said that the Silicon Valley giant would have to cut its discretionary spending and keep its hiring freeze in place until the first quarter of 2023.
“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” Zuckerberg said in the statement. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”
The CEO said that the job cuts were because of a change in online commerce trends after Covid shut down, the general economic downturn, and more competition, all of which caused Meta’s sales to be much lower than expected.
The company will make cuts in all of its departments, including Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which together are called Meta’s Family of Apps, as well as in its Reality Labs metaverse division. However, this division will be less affected than the others.
The CEO says that Meta has a “long-term vision for the metaverse” even though Reality Labs lost more than $3.6 billion in the third quarter of 2022.
Officially launched in August 2020, Reality Labs is the virtual and augmented reality division of Meta that designs gear and software, including the Oculus virtual reality device and the Horizon World metaverse project.
“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 across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs,” added Zuckerburg.
Meta has rolled out NFT features for Instagram and Facebook throughout 2022, making them available to all U.S. users of the two platforms in September.
The feature lets users add NFTs to their profiles. It currently works with digital collectibles—as Meta calls them—issued on the Ethereum, Flow, and Polygon blockchains. Support for the Solana blockchain is also in the works.
This month, Meta announced that Instagram users will be able to mint and sell NFTs by using the Polygon blockchain.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: All content provided on this website, any hyperlinked sites, social media accounts and other platforms is for general information only and has been procured from third party sources. We make no warranties of any kind regarding this content. None of the content should be interpreted as financial, legal, or other advice meant to be relied on for any purpose. Any use or reliance on this content is done at your own risk and discretion. It is your responsibility to conduct research, review, analyze, and verify the content before relying on it.
