Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta is cutting corporate teams in its latest round of layoffs
Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc cut jobs in its business and operations units on Wednesday as it carried out the last of a three-part layoff, part of a plan announced in March to eliminate 10,000 roles.
Dozens of employees working in marketing, site security, corporate planning, program management, content strategy and corporate communications teams, among others, notified LinkedIn of their layoffs.
The social media giant also cut employees from its units focused on privacy and integrity, according to LinkedIn posts.
Earlier this year, Meta became the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs after more than 11,000 workers were laid off in the fall. The cuts brought the company’s headcount back to about where it was in mid-2021, with headcount doubling starting in 2020.
The company’s shares closed a slightly weaker market situation. They have more than doubled in value this year and are among the best performers in the S&P 500, thanks to cost cutting and Meta’s focus on artificial intelligence.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March that most of the layoffs in the company’s second round would happen in three “moments” over several months and would mostly end in May. Some smaller rounds may continue after that, he said.
Overall, the cuts have hit non-engineering roles the hardest, reinforcing the primacy of code writers at Meta. Zuckerberg has promised to transform business teams “significantly” and return to “a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles.”
Even among cuts aimed specifically at technology teams, the company has cut the most non-engineering roles, such as content design and user experience research, according to executives speaking at a company town hall after the last round of layoffs in April.
About 4,000 employees lost their jobs in April, Zuckerberg said, following a smaller hit at City Hall in March.
The social media company said on Wednesday that the latest cuts are likely to affect around 490 employees at its international headquarters in Dublin, or nearly 20 percent of its Irish workforce.
Two top executives in the India capital market — chief marketing officer Avinash Pant and Saket Jha Saurabh, director and head of media partnerships — were also let go, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Both executives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Meta’s layoffs followed months of waning revenue growth due to high inflation and a pullback from digital advertising in the wake of the pandemic e-commerce boom.
The company has also poured billions of dollars into its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs unit, which will lose $13.7 billion in 2022, and a project to fix up its infrastructure to support AI work.
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