Menlo Park (US), Nov 10 (FN Agency) The parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp reduced its work force by 13 per cent and extended a hiring freeze through the first quarter of next year. Since Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, the Silicon Valley company has steadily hired more employees. At the end of September, it had amassed its largest-ever number of workers, totalling 87,314 people, the New York Times reported. But on Wednesday, the company — now renamed Meta — began cutting jobs, and deeply, it said. Meta said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 per cent of its work force, in what amounted to the company’s most significant job cuts. The layoffs were made across departments and regions, with areas like recruiting and business teams affected more than others, the Times 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, two people with knowledge of the matter said. “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” Zuckerberg, 38, wrote in a letter to employees. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.” The cuts — nearly triple the number that Twitter slashed last week, though not as deep a percentage — represent a stunning reversal of fortune for a once high-flying company whose ambition and room for growth had seemed limitless, the report said.
Meta spent lavishly over the years, accumulating users, buying companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp, and showering its employees with enviable perks. Not even scrutiny over its data privacy practices and the toxic content on its apps could dent its financial performance, as its stock continued climbing and its revenues soared. At one point last year, Meta was valued at $1 trillion. But the company has struggled financially this year as it has tried to move into a new business — the immersive world of the so-called metaverse — while grappling with a global economic slowdown and a decline in digital advertising, the main source of its revenue, the Times said. New competitors like TikTok emerged to capture a younger audience while Meta’s services lost their sheen. Last month, Meta posted a 50 per cent slide in quarterly profits and its second straight sales decline, even as its spending soared by 19 percent. Its stock has dropped roughly 70 per cent this year. Zuckerberg attributed the cuts on Wednesday to growing too quickly during the pandemic, when a surge in online commerce led to a big spike in revenue. He said he had thought the shift would be permanent, leading him to significantly increase spending. “Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected,” Zuckerberg said. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”