Facebook owner Meta to lay off 11,000 employees in Q1 2023

Meta the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is laying off 13 percent of its staff, or more than 11,000 employees through the first quarter of 2023, CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed the employees on Wednesday.

“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,” Zuckerberg said in a letter.

Zuckerberg further added that he wants to take accountability for these decisions, as he expressed his sorry to those who impacted, the letter mentioned.

Impacted employees will receive 16 weeks of pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, Zuckerberg said, adding that Meta will cover health insurance for six months.

In addition to that Meta will provide three months of career support with an external vendor, including early access to unpublished job leads.

The layoffs were made across departments and regions, with areas like recruiting and business teams affected more than others.

Two people with knowledge of the matter said, the divisions that were not cut as steeply included engineers working on projects related to the metaverse, the immersive online world that Zuckerberg has bet big on.

Last month, he warned that “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” He added that the company would “end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organisation than we are today.”

The cuts are nearly triple the number that Twitter slashed last week, though not as deep a percentage, that represent a stunning reversal of fortune for a once high-flying company whose ambition and room for growth had seemed limitless.