From The Verge: Meta has announced it will lay off 11,000 employees or around 13 percent of the company’s total staff. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news in a blog post, saying he was at fault for being overoptimistic about the company’s future growth based on a pandemic surge.
“At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” said Zuckerberg. “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.”
Zuckerberg said the company would now become “leaner and more efficient” by cutting spending and staff, and shift more resources to “a smaller number of high priority growth areas,” including ads, AI, and the metaverse. Zuckerberg said that the company’s recruiting team would be particularly “disproportionately affected” by the cuts. Meta reported some 87,000 employees in September, with today’s layoffs making the first broad cuts since the firm’s founding in 2004.
Why has Meta been hit so hard? Well, a projected downturn in the US economy has blunted momentum for many tech stocks, but the company’s prospects have also been affected by both strong competition from rivals and wayward strategy.
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