Meta, parent company of social networks Facebook and Instagram, will cut 10,000 more jobs, after a first wave of 11,000 layoffs in early November, group CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday. In addition, the Menlo Park giant will eliminate from its organization chart 5,000 positions currently unoccupied and for which there will be no recruitment, the manager said in a press release.
The list of positions concerned will be unveiled at the end of April and the restructuring will be carried out by the end of the year. At the end of these two waves, Meta will have cut its workforce by 24%, a brutal change of gear for a group that had never launched a social plan in nearly twenty years of existence.
For Mark Zuckerberg, the decision is justified by the need to “make (Meta) a better technology company” and “improve [its] financial performance in a difficult environment in order to achieve [their] long-term vision” .
The co-founder of Facebook, who embodies the social network on his own, took up the term used during the presentation of the annual results in early February, namely that 2023 must be “the year of efficiency” for Meta. In addition to the job cuts, the company will slow the pace of its hiring, added Mark Zuckerberg, who also plans to “cancel non-priority projects”.
The group had already announced a hiring freeze until the end of March 2023. After having posted insolent growth since its creation, Facebook, which became Meta at the end of 2021, has suffered, since last year, from the slowdown in online advertising. The movement is accentuated by the modification of the operating system of the iPhone (iOS), which no longer allows the platform to collect as much data as before on its users.
In addition, Facebook and Instagram are subject to increasingly strong competition, in particular from the video platform TikTok, which is chipping away at its market share. Meta suffers, like the entire technology industry, from the rise in interest rates, which penalizes a very cash-intensive sector to finance its development. In 2022, Meta’s revenue contracted 1% to $116.6 billion.