Meta planning fresh round of layoffs, set to announce restructuring of its staff: Report

Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta on Saturday, February 11, announced that it is planning more job cuts as a part of the large-scale layoffs planned for this week. In March, the company will restructure its staff and will conduct performance reviews, according to a new report from the Financial Times. In November, last year, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, an estimated 13 percent of its global workforce, the largest in its 20-year history. 

Meta is following suit like the companies Amazon and Coinbase, who also unveiled plans to lay off staff by nearly 10,000 employees. The multinational corporations also cut an estimated 18,000 jobs to shrink the headcounts.  

Plans to fire nearly 87,000 employees

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in his earlier statements, had acknowledged that he plans to reduce the firm into “a slightly smaller organization” by the end of 2023. The Facebook parent company plans to fire nearly 87,000 employees and has announced for the staff to cancel non-essential travel until September. Meta's officials, who were reached for the comments by the broadcasters, denied any statements but added that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the press that the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas.”

During Meta's third-quarter earnings call,  Zuckerberg had earlier noted that "some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year." Furthermore, he stressed, “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”

The recent layoffs are a part of several months of Meta's planning to shrink its staff, which has been speculating that their roles will be eliminated in order to have a smaller team. In June, last year, Zuckerberg told employees at a company meeting that "here [at Meta] are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here." Speaking at the Q&A session with employees, Zuckerberg warned that there was one of the "worst downturns" that Meta was witnessing in its history. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” he told the employees. The company, at the time, had indicated that it plans to reduce staff to 6,000 or 7,000 workers from 10,000.