Meta begins another round of mass layoffs, third in three months

Meta has reportedly begun another round of mass layoffs. This is the third and final round of a massive job cut announced in mid-March. Facebook‘s parent company has laid off around 10,000 employees across these three rounds. It previously cut more than 11,000 jobs in November last year, taking the total layoffs to over 21,000.

According to Reuters, the latest round of mass layoffs at Meta mostly affect non-engineering roles. The report states that employees across marketing, site security, enterprise engineering, program management, content strategy, and corporate communications have lost their jobs this week. In a separate report, the publication said that this job cut affected around 490 jobs at the company’s international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. That’s almost 20% of its Irish workforce.

Meta hasn’t officially announced these layoffs. But the company said in March that it will let go of more than 10,000 employees over the next few months and freeze hiring for around 5,000 open positions globally. Following some job cuts in March, it fired around 4,000 employees in April. A few thousand more are now being let go. As said earlier, this comes after an even bigger layoff in November last year when Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees.

The latest mass layoffs reduce Meta’s global workforce by 25% in six months

A total of 21,000 job cuts by Meta means that the company has reduced its global workforce by about 25% over the past six months or so. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in November that the goal is to “become a leaner and more efficient company” amid a challenging economic situation. The social network behemoth is also shrinking its real estate footprint, “transitioning to desk sharing for people who already spend most of their time outside the office”.

It hasn’t scaled back investments in the metaverse and AR/VR technologies, though. Zuckerberg has said that Meta will prioritize growth for certain products over others in these challenging situations.

Of course, Meta isn’t the only tech biggie feeling the heat of this global economic downturn. Pretty much every other firm has announced massive job cuts over the past few months to reduce their operational costs. Amazon fired around 27,000 employees across two rounds of mass layoffs in January and March of this year.

Google parent Alphabet has cut 12,000 jobs while Microsoft has let go of around 10,000 employees. Disney (7,000), Dell (6,650), Twitter (more than 6,000), IBM (3,900), and PayPal (2,000) are a few other firms that have cut multi-thousand jobs in recent months. Samsung, Apple, and others have also announced small-scale layoffs.