Business at the Facebook group Meta is weaker after the Corona boom. Founder Mark Zuckerberg is therefore starting a second major round of job cuts.
More job cuts: The house blessing is crooked at the Facebook group Meta
The Facebook group Meta wants to cut around 10,000 jobs in another large wave of job cuts. In addition, around 5,000 vacancies are no longer to be filled, announced founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg. In an e-mail to employees, he wrote that the downsizing will take place over the coming months.
Just a short time ago there were almost 90,000 employees
In November, Meta had already cut 11,000 jobs, which was around 13 percent of the workforce at the time. Things had looked different during the pandemic. Back then, many small businesses turned to Facebook advertising to boost their business. Meta made good money and also hired heavily. At the end of 2019, the group had 45,000 employees, at the time of the job cuts in November 2022 there were over 87,000.
With a view to the second wave of layoffs now imminent, Zuckerberg acknowledged that such upheavals in a company “uncertainty and stress ” produced. He hopes to implement the changes as soon as possible so that this period of uncertainty can be quickly put behind.
Facebook founder Zuckerberg wants to quickly pull through with the new job cuts
In the coming months, managers would present restructuring plans, Zuckerberg wrote about the further schedule. The aim is to flatten the hierarchies, discontinue projects with low priority and slow down the pace of new hires.
Meta senses the reluctance of advertisers who are more careful with their money. Also, the Tiktok app is a strong rival for advertising dollars – and Apple's privacy measures on the iPhone made ads on Facebook less effective.
“Metaverse” isn't doing well
< p>At the same time, Zuckerberg is investing many billions of dollars in the development of virtual “metaverse” worlds. Last year alone, the corresponding Reality Labs division posted an operating loss of a good 13.7 billion dollars (currently 12.78 billion euros). Meta already announced on Tuesday night that Facebook and Instagram will now discontinue the functions related to the so-called NFTs after the former hype about digital collectibles.
Shift – life in the digital world
The step is part of the ongoing focus on priorities, the responsible manager Stephane Kasriel wrote on Twitter. A spokesman for the technology blog “The Verge” explained that the possibility of sharing NFTs via Instagram and Facebook will be eliminated in the coming weeks. NFTSs (non-fungible tokens) are something like digital certificates of authenticity. They ensure that among a large number of potentially completely identical copies, only one file can be considered the signed original, so to speak.
The NFT hype peaked around two years ago as a digital work of art costing more than $69 million was sold. Among other things, NFTs have been seen as a way to own and trade digital objects in the Metaverse. Since then, however, enthusiasm for both NFTs and the Metaverse has waned noticeably.
haz/qu (dpa, rtr, afp)