Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is set to lay off approximately 4,000 employees, representing 5% of its global workforce.
The layoffs will primarily target the “lowest performers,” as identified by company executives, with notifications being sent out via email on Monday morning, reported Fox 4 KDFW. Despite these cuts, Meta still has around 1,000 job openings available in California, and the company plans to focus on hiring for critical positions, particularly in machine learning.
This latest round of layoffs follows significant workforce reductions over the past year, during which Meta let go of about 21,000 employees, representing nearly a quarter of its staff.
Here is the rest of the story from Fox:
MENLO PARK, Calif. – Tech and social media giant Meta is laying off thousands of workers in an effort to push productivity upward.
What we know:
A Business Insider report said Meta, whose platforms include Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, is cutting 5% of its workforce.
According to estimates, that would be about 4,000 workers.
Employees are expected to be notified by email on Monday morning.
Despite the layoffs, Meta still has about 1,000 job openings in California.
The backstory:
According to Reuters, Meta executives say they’re targeting the company’s “lowest performers” and will backfill positions.
The company classifies the cuts that impact countries across the globe as “performance terminations.”
While workers in the United States are getting the bad news on Monday, employees in more than a dozen other countries in Europe, Asia and Africa got let-go notices for Feb. 11 to 18.
Meta staffers in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands are exempt from the cuts, according to Reuters, “due to local regulations.”
The company says it’ll expedite the hiring of machine learning engineers and other business-critical roles.
Some industry experts say employees who have pushed back against returning to full-time office work could be targeted by this second round of Meta reductions.
From 2022 to 2023, the company sacked about a quarter of it’s workforce, or 21,000 people.
University of New Haven business professor James Mohs said that Meta has been laying people off since 2023, targeting “low performers.”
“Those that are not performing up to the standards. Now, there’s another blurb that says Mister Zuckerberg has raised standards,” where some people are “working from home and not doing much.”
Mohs said that costs companies productivity, and many are or will soon move completely away from that option.
Affected workers will be offered severance in line with what Meta has previously given its “exiting” — that’s their word — employees.
Big picture view:
Meta, based in Menlo Park, isn’t the only Silicon Valley company to be laying off workers.
Workday, based in Pleasanton, and Salesforce, based in San Francisco, also announced layoffs this month, citing a desire to invest more in Artifical Intelligence.