The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta Group, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, plans to lay off thousands of employees starting this week, following the lead of several technology companies in the context of the economic crisis.
Meta employs about 87,000 employees worldwide, according to September 30 figures.
While publishing the latest disappointing quarterly results recently, group president Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the company’s headcount should not rise by the end of 2023, even that it should decline slightly.
According to the newspaper’s sources, it is expected that this will be announced on Wednesday and that thousands of employees will be affected in the first such measure in the history of the social media giant.
And last Thursday, two Silicon Valley groups, Stripe and Lyft, announced massive layoffs, while Amazon froze hiring.
As soon as Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the world’s richest man acquired the Twitter platform, he laid off about half of its 7,500 employees.
Online platforms whose economic model is based on advertising are particularly suffering from advertisers cutting back on spending on the back of global inflation and rising interest rates.
Meta Group net profit fell to $4.4 billion in the third quarter (-52% YoY).
“We are facing a volatile macro economy, increased competition, lost advertising, and increased costs for our long-term investments,” Zuckerberg noted in late October, stressing that “our product prospects, from what I can see, are better off than some of the comments suggest.”
However, the group’s shares fell the next day by 24,56 percent on Wall Street.
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