The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., intends to implement its first large mass layoff later this week, potentially affecting thousands of employees (WSJ).
According to the WSJ, Meta officials have already instructed staff to cancel any unnecessary travel plans starting this week. At the end of September, the company employed over 87,000 people.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that in 2023, the business will “focus our spending on a small handful of high priority growth areas” during Meta’s Q3 earnings call.
Last year, Meta changed its name from Facebook to Meta to emphasize the metaverse and virtual reality (VR) technology.
According to Business Insider, the business has invested around US$36 billion on Reality Labs, its VR division, but has also racked up an operating loss of US$30.7 billion.
According to previously released internal documents from the tech business, Horizon Worlds, its flagship metaverse platform, fell short of reaching its target of 500,000 monthly active users (MAU) at the time because its MAU languished below 200,000. About 70% has been lost from Meta Stocks  this year.
Following Elon Musk’s US$44 billion acquisition, rival communications technology company Twitter let go of approximately 3,700 workers, or about half of its workforce, at the end of October.
