In a recent announcement, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Meta, confirmed that it will lay off 13% of its workforce – that is, 11,000 layoffs.
See also: Report: Meta to announce mass employee layoffs
CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote a statement apologizing to those affected by the situation and taking responsibility for the decisions that led to it.
In recent weeks, several companies have announced plans to reduce their workforces, with Twitter being one of them. Twitter is cutting its workforce by about half in light of Elon Musk. Last week, Stripe revealed that it would also cut its staff by 1,120 employees, or 14%. And just yesterday, Salesforce confirmed reports that “hundreds” of employees have been laid off.
The layoffs at Meta were no secret, but now we understand the company's plans and what this means for stakeholders.
See also: Zuckerberg won't abandon the metaverse and Meta stock plummets
Meta's workforce is about 87,000, which means 11,000 people will leave Meta globally. According to Zuckerberg, each employee will receive 16 weeks of severance pay, plus two additional weeks for each year of service. So, an employee who has worked at Meta for four years will essentially receive six months of severance pay.
In addition, employees will be paid for all pre-existing and unused days off and health coverage for employees and their families will remain active for six months.
Meta’s path to where it is today is common to many other companies that have gone through similar changes. After becoming one of the few trillion-dollar companies in the midst of the pandemic, Meta sought a new direction in the form of the metaverse and rebranded from Facebook to Meta.
See also: Interpol created a global Metaverse police force
It would be inaccurate to say that Meta's current state is solely due to a costly turnaround, but the company has certainly thrown a lot of money at a project that isn't quite ready for release.
Information source: techcrunch.com
