The second week of November will be a dark one for thousands of employees at Meta Corporation, during which they are likely to receive forced layoff notices as part of a blanket layoff.
In June 2022, Meta Corporation was forced to shrink its plans to hire new engineers. Even then, its founder Mark Zuckerberg notified employees of the impending financial difficulties associated with the economic downturn. In less than six months, they covered the company. This weekend in the US media there was alarming information that the announcement of staff cuts will be made as early as November 9th. The results of the third quarter were disappointing, so Zuckerberg announced a very limited number of investment priorities in 2023 and plans to cut jobs. He emphasized that the entire technology industry is now facing difficulties caused by the slowdown in global economic growth.
True, Meta's problems arose not only because of the downturn in the global economy. The investment company Altimeter Capital, which is its shareholder, had previously sent an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, where he announced the need for optimization, staff cuts and capital expenditures. In addition, it said that Meta has lost investor confidence as its costs rise and it becomes too obsessed with the metaverse. The Facebook founder noted that investments in the metaverse should pay off in about 10 years, but the costs really need to be reduced.
Many ad revenue platforms are now suffering from advertiser budget cuts. At the beginning of November, technology companies Lyft and Stripe began large-scale layoffs of workers, Amazon announced the suspension of recruitment of new employees, and Twitter, bought by Elon Musk, recently announced that it was cutting about 50% of its staff.