Meta To Lay Off 10,000 More Employees After ‘Humbling Wake-Up Call,’ Zuckerberg Says

‘We expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired,’ says Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Social media giant Meta is laying off 10,000 employees and closing an additional 5,000 open roles in a move to drive “efficiency” and a “restructure” of the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

This is the second set of massive tech layoffs at Meta, as the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company disclosed in November it would be laying off 11,000 employees, which represented about 13 percent of its worldwide workforce. This means Meta will have laid off approximately 21,000 employees over the course of about six or seven months.

“We expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a staff memo titled “Update on Meta’s Year of Efficiency” Tuesday. “This will be tough, and there’s no way around that.”

[Related: Latest Microsoft Layoff Wave Hits Supply Chain, Cloud, IoT Employees]

The Meta layoffs will be conducted over the next couple of months, Zuckerberg said.

Why Meta Is Cutting 10,000 Jobs

Between March 2020 and September 2022, Meta nearly doubled its head count due to the COVID-19 pandemic creating high demand for digital services. Meta went from 48,000 employees in March to more than 87,000 in that time span, according to employee data from Meta.

The total number of layoffs means Meta’s head count will likely be around 66,000 employees by this summer.

“For most of our history, we saw rapid revenue growth year after year and had the resources to invest in many new products. But last year was a humbling wake-up call,” said Meta’s CEO. “The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew and our growth slowed considerably.”

Zuckerberg said the new 10,000 cuts are part of his vision for a “flatter is faster” and “leaner is better” company motto.

“Since we reduced our workforce [by 11,000 employees] last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower-priority projects,” said Zuckerberg. “A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster. People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling.”

In addition, as part of Meta’s “Year of Efficiency” in 2023, “we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors,” he said.

IT Layoffs

Meta isn’t the first tech company to announce massive layoffs in 2023.

In terms of large IT layoffs this year, Amazon will lay off 18,000 employees, Salesforce plans to lay off 7,000 staff members, Microsoft will cut 10,000 employees, and Google parent Alphabet will lay off 12,000 employees.

Smaller tech companies aren’t getting away from conducting large layoffs as well.

For example, Scale AI laid off 20 percent of its employees, JumpCloud let go of 12 percent of its workforce, while startup Rigetti Computing laid off 28 percent of its employees this year.

What’s In Store For Meta In 2023

Zuckerberg said after the 10,000 layoffs and the restructuring, Meta plans to lift hiring and transfer freezes in every business group.

“Other relevant efficiency timelines include targeting this summer to complete our analysis from our hybrid work year of learning so we can further refine our distributed work model,” said Meta’s CEO. “We also aim to have a steady stream of developer productivity enhancements and process improvements throughout the year.”

Zuckerberg ended his letter to employees by saying its community is extremely resilient.

“Change is never easy, but I know we’ll get through this and come out an even stronger company that can build better products faster and enable you to do the best work of your careers,” he said.