Meta has said it will lay off 11,000 employees, or approximately 13% of its total staff. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, apologized in a blog post for being unduly optimistic about the company’s future growth based on a pandemic outbreak.
“At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” said Zuckerberg. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”
Zuckerberg claimed that the company will devote more resources to “a smaller number of high priority growth areas,” including as advertising, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse. In September, Meta let off 87,000 employees, the first large-scale layoffs since the company’s founding in 2004.
Why has Meta suffered so much abuse? A predicted slowdown in the U.S. economy has affected the momentum of many technology equities, but the company’s prospects have also been hampered by intense rivalry and bad strategy.
The introduction of TikTok and adjustments to Apple’s privacy laws have hampered the tremendously lucrative ad business of Meta, while the company’s efforts in the burgeoning metaverse look to be misguided. Meta has already lost $9.4 billion on its metaverse technology in 2022, and the company expects to lose substantially more in the future. In the meantime, Horizon Worlds, the company’s major metaverse social platform, is so buggy and unpopular that Meta’s managers have forced to coerce employees into using it.
The stock of Meta has plunged as terrible news has accumulated. In recent weeks, its market value has decreased by $700 billion, and its stock price has declined by more than 70% this year.
Nonetheless, Meta is not the only technology company with massive layoffs. Salesforce acknowledged last week that it has cut off hundreds of employees; Snap said in August that it will reduce its workforce by 20%; and Twitter has laid off tens of thousands of workers under Elon Musk’s supervision.
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