After Twitter, Meta prepares for massive layoffs this week: Report

After Twitter, Meta Platforms Inc. may also launch large-scale layoffs of thousands of employees and an announcement about this may be made by Wednesday, Wall Street Journal said on Sunday.

Meta has not confirmed the same and declined to comment on the report.

The company in its October forecast said it will witness a weak holiday quarter while the cost will rise leading to a depletion of around $67 billion off Meta’s stock market value. The loss will be in addition to the half-a-trillion dollars’ worth of stocks lost this year.

Also read: Twitter fires 4,000 employees; Musk blames activists for biz dip

In view of slow revenue generation, triggered by a sluggish global economy, stiff competition from Tik Tok, massive spending on the metaverse and the threat of regulation, the company has put a freeze on hiring, has put hold on projects and made its teams leaner.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that he has been compelled to cut down costs as it may take over a decade for investments into the ambitious metaverse project to bear fruit.

“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas. So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today,” he said on the last earnings call in October.

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Not just Meta, several IT companies including Twitter, Microsoft and Snap Inc have cut jobs and put a freeze on hiring over the past few months as the global economy reeled from inflation, high interest rates and an energy crisis due to the Russia-Ukraine war.