The Facebook group Meta wants to cut around 10,000 jobs in another large wave of job cuts. In addition, around 5,000 vacancies are no longer to be filled, announced founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg. The dismantling will take place over the coming months, he wrote in an e-mail to the employees.
Only recently there were almost 90,000 employees
In November, Meta had already cut 11,000 jobs, which was around 13 percent of the workforce at the time. Things had looked different during the pandemic. Back then, many small businesses turned to Facebook advertising to boost their business. Meta made good money and also hired heavily. At the end of 2019, the group had 45,000 employees, at the time of the job cuts in November 2022 there were over 87,000.
With the second wave of layoffs now imminent, Zuckerberg acknowledged that such upheavals created “uncertainty and stress” in a company. He hopes to implement the changes as soon as possible so that this period of uncertainty can be put behind them quickly.
In the coming months, managers would present conversion plans, Zuckerberg wrote about the further schedule. The aim is to make hierarchies flatter, to discontinue projects with low priority and to slow down the pace of new hires.
Meta senses the reluctance of advertisers who are more careful with their money. Also, the Tiktok app is a strong rival in the fight for advertising dollars – and Apple’s measures to protect privacy on the iPhone made ads on Facebook less efficient.
“Metaverse” is not doing well
At the same time, Zuckerberg is investing many billions of dollars in the development of virtual “metaverse” worlds. Last year alone, the corresponding Reality Labs division posted an operating loss of a good 13.7 billion dollars (currently 12.78 billion euros). On Tuesday night, Meta announced that Facebook and Instagram would discontinue the functions related to the so-called NFTs after the previous hype about digital collectibles.
The step is part of the ongoing focus on priorities, wrote the responsible manager Stephane Kasriel on Twitter. A spokesman for the technology blog “The Verge” explained that the possibility of sharing NFTs via Instagram and Facebook will be eliminated in the coming weeks. NFTSs (non-fungible tokens) are something like digital certificates of authenticity. They ensure that among a large number of potentially completely identical copies, only one file can be considered the signed original, so to speak.
The NFT hype peaked around two years ago when a digital artwork sold for more than $69 million. Among other things, NFTs have been seen as a way to own and trade digital objects in the Metaverse. Since then, however, enthusiasm for both NFTs and the Metaverse has waned noticeably.
haz/qu (dpa, rtr, afp)