By Investing.com Staff
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, confirmed that the company will cut about 13% of its workforce or about 11,000 jobs. Zuckerberg added that the company will also be cutting discretionary spending and extending a hiring freeze through Q1.
"Today I'm sharing some of the most difficult changes we've made in Meta's history," Zuckerberg said in a message to employees. "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."
In explaining how the company got oversized, Zuckerberg said at the start of COVID the world rapidly moved online and he expected this to be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended.
"Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected," he said. "Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I'd expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that."
Zuckerberg said in the new environment they need to become more capital efficient.
"We've 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. We've cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint," he commented. "We're restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won't bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I've also made the hard decision to let people go."
Departing employees will receive 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service.