Meta from tomorrow will start laying off 10 thousand employees, this is the second massive layoff after the one last November. Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook that this operation will also lead to stopping projects, such as the NFT project.
The news had been in the air for a few days, actually since Mark Zuckerberg himself said that this year would be the year of “cost cutting” and that there would be more layoffs. And so it has been, unfortunately.
In a week that began with the bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank, the one that had been the benchmark for startups and venture capitalists for 40 years, here comes news today of new layoffs from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.
What is known at this time is that starting tomorrow, Wednesday, March 15, 2023, Meta will begin layoffs for a total of 10 thousand people involved and the closing of the search for 5 thousand open positions. Thus, this is, after the one in November that led to laying off 11 thousand employees, a new major reorganization operation for the company.
In a very lengthy post on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg talks about this operation that will unfold over the next two months, with the goal of putting into practice “restructuring plans focused on flattening our organizations, canceling low-priority projects, and reducing hiring,” Zuckerberg writes.
“It’s going to be tough and there’s no way around it. It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We will support people in the same ways we have done so far and treat everyone with the gratitude they deserve.”
As mentioned, the environment is already heavily shaken by the Silicon Valley Bank bankruptcy, and this new wave of massive layoffs is not helping to restore a calm climate, quite the contrary.
According to Layoffs.fyi, 1,050 companies laid off a total of more than 160 employees in 2022. In the first three months of 2023, 483 companies are already making layoffs and 128,200 people have lost their jobs in the tech sector. These are impressive numbers, and if things continue in this way, they may get even worse.
And speaking of projects that do not find a concrete match, before the news of Meta’s new layoffs came, the news that Meta is about to abandon one of the projects that were supposed to find a concrete match within the grand Metaverse project had been in the news in Italy.
Some product news: across the company, we’re looking closely at what we prioritize to increase our focus. We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses. 🧵[1/5]
– Stephane Kasriel (@skasriel) March 13, 2023
And we’re talking about the project that was supposed to enable NFTs on Facebook and Instagram, which was abandoned in the wake of the slowdown on the Metaverse macro project.
“Across the company, we are carefully evaluating priorities to increase our focus,” Stephane Kasriel wrote on Twitter. “For the time being, we are eliminating digital collectibles (NFT) to focus on other ways to support creators, people and companies.” Instead, the company is focusing on “areas where we can make an impact at scale.”
The year “of efficiency” as Zuckerberg puts it is targeting, from a project standpoint, the very Metaverse, the one the entire company had been focusing on, starting with the name. Not that everything gets shut down, but it certainly suffers a major slowdown.
Meanwhile, from the markets’ point of view, Wall Street seems to welcome this move by Meta, the stock gaining over 6.5 percent right now.