Facebook parent company Meta is reportedly planning on laying off “many thousands of its workforce” in what very well may end up being the largest round of layoffs to date at a major technology corporation in a year filled with them.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the announcement of these layoffs is expected to arrive as soon as Wednesday, November 9, and company officials have already “told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week.”
The planned layoffs would be the first time Meta, which was previously known as Facebook, has done broad head-count reductions since it was founded 18 years ago.
At the end of September 2022, Meta reported that it had more than 87,000 employees across the globe. While the job cuts don’t appear to be as big of a percentage of the total workforce as Twitter’s was this past week, the number of employees looks to be larger than the up to 3,700 employees Twitter is planning on laying off.
A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment, and instead directed WSJ to a previous statement from Mark Zuckerberg that the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.”
“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year,” Zuckerberg said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 26. “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
Meta has been reducing its workforce in certain departments in a much smaller way, and Zuckerberg even told the employees at a companywide meeting in June 2022 that “realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
This unfortunate news follows Meta’s quarterly earnings that revealed that its Reality Labs division, which covers its VR, XR, and metaverse endeavors, saw $3.7 billion in losses from operations. Reality Labs has lost $9.4 billion so far this year, and that’s even up from the $6.9 billion it lost in the same period in 2021.
Meta recently announced the Meta Quest Pro VR headset for $1,499 and its focus on building out Horizon Worlds which, according to the internet, is not at a place that is currently enticing many people, has been a point of contention. WSJ reports that Horizon Worlds has well under 200,000 users this year.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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