Meta is laying off employees for the third time in less than three months
The company has cut more than 20,000 jobs since November.
Meta has started another round of layoffs amid the company’s “year of efficiency.” The latest job cuts are the third round of a series of cuts first announced in March. The company said it expected to shed a total of 10,000 jobs over the course of three rounds.
It’s unclear exactly how many workers are impacted by the latest round, but the layoffs, once again, seem to be primarily in non-engineering roles. People in marketing, communications, and recruiting have lost their jobs, according to Reuters, which cited posts on LinkedIn. Meta will also be slashing nearly 500 jobs from its Irish office, about 20 percent of its workforce in the country, according to a separate report.
Meta declined to comment on the cuts. A spokesperson pointed to a memo Mark Zuckerberg shared with employees last fall when the company conducted an earlier round of 11,000 layoffs. In the message, he said that economic conditions had “caused our revenue to be much lower” than expected. He described the job cuts as “some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history” and “what we need going forward.”
Zuckerberg has talked openly about the need for more “efficiency” in the months since. He dubbed 2023 as Meta’s “year of efficiency,” and said he wants to create a “flatter” management structure at the company. “I continue to believe that slowing hiring, flattening our management structure, increasing the percent of our company that is technical and more rigorously prioritizing projects will improve the speed and quality of our work,” he said during the company’s most recent earnings call.
The conclusion of the latest round of layoffs brings the total number of workers Meta has cut to about 21,000 since last November. Though Meta’s layoffs have been among the highest in the industry, it’s far from the only tech company shedding jobs over the last several months. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and dozens of others have dramatically shrunk their workforce since the start of the year.
