Meta (formerly known as Facebook) announced on 9 November that more than 11,000 of their employees would be laid off, in line with the layoffs at other tech companies such as Twitter and Microsoft, according to CNBC.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that those who are affected would receive a severance package.
Explaining his reason for the mass firing of employees, Zuckerberg cited high inflation rates and a weak advertising market as the reason.
“Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected.”
“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”
He also called the higher investments in e-commerce a “big mistake”.
During the pandemic, Meta hired aggressively due to a huge increase in social media usage, and their workforce rose to 87,000 workers at the end of September.
Retrenched workers will get a severance package of 16 weeks of base pay, with an additional 2 weeks for every year of service, and the company will also pay for all of the remaining time off.
According to sources on LinkedIn, the layoffs have also affected Meta employees in Singapore, with at least 10 employees fired.