On Sunday, November 6, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, plans to begin layoffs this week, affecting thousands of employees. The daily newspaper based in New York City cited people familiar with the matter as confirming that the job cuts were set to be the most significant at the company since it was founded in 2004.
Breaking: Facebook parent Meta plans to begin laying off thousands of employees this week, people familiar with the matter said https://t.co/NVAJtM4LLZ
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) November 6, 2022
An official announcement regarding the same is expected to come on Wednesday, November 9, 2022.
According to the persons who declined to be identified because they were not permitted to speak publicly, it was still unknown how many people would be laid off and in which departments.
As of September 30, Meta had about 87,000 employees worldwide across its different platforms, which include social media sites Facebook and Instagram as well as the messaging platform WhatsApp.
Notably, in a companywide meeting that took place in September 2022, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said that the social network is freezing hiring across the board. He also warned that more layoffs are in the pipeline.
“Our plan is to steadily reduce headcount growth over the next year. Many teams are going to shrink so we can shift energy to other areas,” Zuckerberg had reportedly said during the last Meta earnings call.
Job cuts at Meta were expected for a while after the company’s revenue declined for two straight financial quarters. According to reports, Meta’s profits fell 52 percent year on year in the third quarter to $4.4 billion. The company’s share price has dropped by more than 70% this year, and its market value has dropped to $600 billion in the last year.
Twitter fires almost all employees in India
Twitter laid off most of its employees in India on November 4, 2022. Though the company has laid off employees in its marketing, communication and engineering department in large numbers, other departments of the company are also undergoing significant shuffle and layoffs including the engineering department.
The CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, as well as the CFO and a few other senior executives were fired last week by the world’s richest businessman, Elon Musk, who started his tenure there. Musk has now begun a significant effort to reduce the company’s overall staff. Layoffs in India are a component of the same exercise. The extent of this radical shift in the organizational structure can be gauged by the fact that Twitter has 300 employees in India and almost 250 employees across all the functions were fired by Elon Musk who was anyways not happy with the old management for their allegedly dishonest and untrue appearance during the acquisition deal.
