Meta plans to lay off about 10,000 employees in the coming months, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff Tuesday.
This is the second major round of layoffs at the company, after 11,000 workers were let go this fall, and follows Zuckerberg’s promise to make this the “Year of Efficiency” at the social media platform, which owns Facebook and Instagram. The company will also close around 5,000 additional roles that it hasn’t yet filled.
In the memo, Zuckerberg said there will be a reduction in recruiting team members, as fewer jobs are being filled, with those impacted employees being told this week. Restructuring and layoffs in the company’s tech groups will start in late April and the business groups will be impacted in late May. Some layoffs may be completed by the end of the year.
“As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs — and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long-term vision,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Shares of Meta were rising 6 percent Tuesday morning.
In February, Zuckerberg introduced the idea of the “Year of Efficiency,” as the company continued to see its financials trending in the wrong direction. In Tuesday’s memo, he outlined further management principles to get toward that vision, including the idea that “Flatter is Faster,” which means the company will remove multiple levels of management, with many managers being asked to be individual contributors and for others to have no more than 10 direct reports.
The company is also canceling duplicative projects and focusing more on tech hiring, rather than other roles. Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of in-person work, encouraging employees to find opportunities to work together in person, and saying that early data showed better performance among early career engineers who had worked or joined Meta in person.
Meta is one of many tech and media companies, including Amazon, Vimeo, and Salesforce, to conduct layoffs in the face of a challenging macroeconomic environment and the uncertainty it brings. Zuckerberg cautioned that this type of environment may persist for years.
“At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years. Higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation. Given this outlook, we’ll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success,” he wrote.