Meta (Facebook) Layoffs Begin TODAY, Zuckerberg Says ‘Sorry’

Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is cutting 11,000 jobs.

Zuckerberg apologized and said ‘I got this wrong’ as the company cut roughly 13% of its workforce.

“Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history,” Zuckerberg said in the letter.

“I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”

JUST IN – Zuckerberg cuts 11,000 jobs at Facebook owner Meta.

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 9, 2022

Mark Zuckerberg apologizes as #Meta announces 11,000 jobs cut. Says ‘I got this wrong.’ Job cuts represent ~13% of Meta’s employees BUT that's just about 1/3rd of the jobs Zuck has created since the pandemic. https://t.co/Kothv8LLMg pic.twitter.com/AeGwgnOJcO

— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) November 9, 2022

BREAKING: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company will cut 13% of jobs affecting more than 11,000 employees, the first major round of layoffs in the social media giant’s history https://t.co/heUXkZEQPL pic.twitter.com/yFg8tZbI0i

— Bloomberg (@business) November 9, 2022

CNBC reported:

The layoffs come amid a tough time for Facebook parent company Meta, which provided lukewarm guidance in late October for its upcoming fourth-quarter earnings that spooked investors and caused its shares to sink nearly 20%.

Investors have been concerned about Meta’s rising costs and expenses, which jumped 19% year over year in the third quarter to $22.1 billion. The company’s overall sales declined 4% to $27.71 billion in the quarter while its operating income dropped 46% from the previous year to $5.66 billion.

“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.” Zuckerberg said.

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He said Meta is making reductions in every organization but that recruiting will be disproportionately affected since the company plans to hire fewer people in 2023. The company extended its hiring freeze through the first quarter with a few exceptions, Zuckerberg said.

Bloomberg noted:

Zuckerberg said in the statement that he’d anticipated that the surge in e-commerce and web traffic from the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdowns would be part of a permanent acceleration. “But the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than expected. I got this wrong.”

Meta is joining a spate of technology companies that have announced job cuts in recent weeks or said they planned to pause hiring. Corporate software maker Salesforce Inc. on Tuesday said it cut hundreds of workers from sales teams, while Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. have all slowed or paused hiring. Snap Inc., parent of rival app Snapchat, is also scaling back, saying in August that it would eliminate 20% of its workforce.

In a particularly chaotic round of dismissals, Twitter Inc. cut roughly half of its workforce last week with many employees finding out they’d lost their jobs when they were suddenly cut off from Slack or email.

At Meta, employees will continue to have access to their emails so that they can say goodbye to colleagues, though they’ve been cut off from more sensitive corporate systems, Zuckerberg said. US workers who were cut will also get 16 weeks of their base salary as severance, plus two weeks for every year they worked at the company. The company is also offering six months of health-care coverage as well as career services and immigration support. Packages will be similar outside the US, in keeping with local employment laws, it said.