Facebook's umbrella company Meta is laying off 11,000 workers, or about 13 percent of its workforce. The company also plans to cut discretionary spending, and it will extend its hiring freeze throughout the next quarter.
Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared the news in a blog post Wednesday, saying the decision was among the "most difficult" in Meta's history.
"I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted," he wrote.
In the post, Zuckerberg blames his reaction to the COVID pandemic, which initially led to "outsized revenue growth."
"Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected," he wrote. "The macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected."
The decision comes after a drop in revenue and a sharp drop in stock price, partially fuelled by Zuckerberg's insistence to invest billions of dollars in the virtual reality ecosystem called the metaverse.
Zuckerberg did not give up on the metaverse, however. "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," he wrote in the note announcing the layoffs.
The employees who were fired mostly lost access to Meta systems on Wednesday, which Zuckerberg claims was due to the "amount of access to sensitive information." They will get 16 weeks of severance pay, plus two additional weeks for ever year of service, paid remaining PTO time, and covered healthcare for them and their families for six months, among other support measures.
As for what comes next, Zuckerberg said the company will share more on how it plans to continue forward "in the weeks ahead."
