Meta (Facebook, Instagram) plans to lay off thousands of people starting this week, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), as several tech companies just laid off some of their workforces in response to the economic crisis.
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According to the American daily, this could be the largest social plan in the industry since the pandemic, which has largely benefited the growth in revenue but also in the workforce of these companies.
As of September 30, Meta employed around 87,000 people worldwide.
In the recent release of the company’s latest disappointing quarterly results, CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that the group’s workforce should not be increased until the end of 2023, or even be reduced slightly.
According to WSJ sources, the redundancy plan is due to be announced on Wednesday and several thousand employees will be affected by this first redundancy plan in the history of the social networking giant.
Last Thursday, two Silicon Valley companies, Stripe and Lyft, reported widespread layoffs as Amazon froze hiring at its offices.
Twitter, recently acquired by Elon Musk, has just laid off about half of its 7,500 employees.
Platforms whose economic model is based on advertising suffer particularly from budget cuts from advertisers struggling with inflation and rising interest rates.
loss of profit
Meta’s net income melted to $4.4 billion in the third quarter (-52% YoY).
“We are facing an unstable macroeconomic environment, increased competition, advertising targeting issues and rising costs for our long-term investments, but I have to say that our products seem to be doing better than some comments suggest,” Mark Zuckerberg tried to mitigate At the end of October during the conference with analysts.
But the California group’s stock fell 24.56% on Wall Street the next day.
In one year, Meta lost nearly $600 billion in market cap.
The company has worried markets since earlier this year when it first announced it had lost users on its original social network, Facebook.
The costly investments to build the metaverse presented as the future of the internet do not reassure investors who doubt the group’s ability to generate significant revenue from this fledgling parallel universe.