After Twitter, it's Facebook Parent company Meta who has started firing employees. Meta has today fired eleven thousand of its employees, citing a drop in revenue as the core reason behind the lay offs.
Today I'm sharing some of the most difficult changes we've made in Meta's history. I've decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.Mark Zuckerberg
While stressing upon the need to become more Capital efficient, Zuckerberg said the company would shift resources to "high priority growth areas" such as its AI discovery engine, ads and business platforms, as well as its metaverse project.
And to expedite the same, Zuckerberg said, "We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1."
The reductions, since the founding of Facebook in 2004, reflect a sharp slowdown in digital advertising revenue, an economy wobbling on the brink of recession and Mark Zuckerberg's heavy investment in a speculative virtual-reality push called the metaverse.
Snap, parent of rival app Snapchat, is on the verge of following the same path, announced in August that it would eliminate 20% of its workforce.
With such massive layoffs happening across the industry, the question remains, is laying off the only alternative to sustain in the environment?