Breaking: Meta Lays off 11,000 Employees; Mentions Vision For Metaverse

Meta Layoff News: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a message on the layoff decision with Meta employees. The message said he decided to reduce the team size by about 13%, which translates to more than 11,000 employees worldwide. He termed the layoffs as “the most difficult changes made in Meta’s history.” Also, the tech company will be extending its hiring freeze through the first quarter.

At the core of the layoff decision is the backfiring of aggressive investment strategy as Covid accelerated online activity. Mark Zukerberg said he anticipated continued acceleration even after the end of the pandemic. “Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”

The Vision For Metaverse

Zuckerberg stressed on the company’s need for becoming capital efficient. He added that the company shifted more resources into high priority growth areas, one of which is the Metaverse. Other focus areas for the tech giant include AI discovery engine, advertisements and business platforms, he added. The 11,000 layoffs span across all organizations across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs.

“We have shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse.”

Streamlined Teams

In a detailed statement, the CEO said the company would share details on its streamlined operation in the weeks ahead. Also, the company will go through an internal restructuring of business teams, Zuckerberg said. The layoffs come in the context of the company’s recent largescale investment in its Metaverse division. Earlier, Elon Musk led Twitter announced it was letting go 50% of its workforce to cuts costs.

Recently, the company enabled making and selling NFTs on Instagram. It remains to be seen how the company’s ling term vision for building a Metaverse will pan out in the coming future. The META stock price took suffered a decline due to the layoff announcement on Wednesday. However, the stock price recovered partially with an effective 0.26% drop in the day. As of writing, META stock price stands at $96.47.