For the Second Time in 4 Months, Meta Lays Off 10,000 Employees

Dream - Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that they will lay off 10,000 employees. 

This layoff is the second one after four months ago, when the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram cut 11,000 of its employees.

"We hope to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and fill around 5,000 additional open positions that we haven't hired yet," said Mark Zuckerberg, quoted from VOA News, Wednesday, March 15, 2023.

The layoff news from the company based in Menlo Park, California, United States, caused Meta's stock to rise by 2 percent in premarket trading.

Zuckerberg plans to turn 2023 into the "Year of Efficiency" with promised cost cuts of $5 billion, bringing it between $89 billion and $95 billion.

The layoff is also part of a broad restructuring at Meta to flatten its organizational structure, cancel projects with lower priorities, and reduce recruitment levels.

Meta itself has poured billions of dollars into building the metaverse. They are struggling amid post-pandemic advertising spending with high inflation and rising interest rates.

The layoffs that occurred within Meta in November 2022, at least cut the number of employees by 13 percent. Meta carried out its first mass layoff in its 18-year history. 

The number of Meta employees is known to reach 86,482 at the end of 2022, a 20 percent increase from the previous year.

The global economic uncertainty has also triggered a series of mass layoffs in several companies in America, ranging from Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to Big Tech companies including Amazon and Microsoft.

The technology industry has laid off more than 280,000 workers since the beginning of 2022, with about 40 percent occurring this year, according to the layoff tracking site layoffs.fyi. (Source: Liputan6.com)