Mark Zuckerberg, head of the “Meta” group that owns Facebook, announced that he intends to lay off more than 11,000 employees, in what he considered “the most difficult changes in the history” of the company, which he attributed to the repercussions of the Corona pandemic and the “economic downturn.”
"Today I'm telling you some of the toughest changes we've made in META's history," Zuckerberg said in a letter to META employees. "I've decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13%, and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go."
He continued, "We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a smaller and more efficient company, by cutting spending, while continuing to freeze our hiring during the first quarter of the year (next)."
And he added: "I want to take responsibility for these decisions, and how we got to this stage. I know that this is difficult for everyone, and I especially apologize to those affected" by these decisions.
Zuckerberg told employees that he had expected the boom in e-commerce and online activity to continue during the pandemic, but acknowledged he had "misjudged" and bears responsibility for it.
He pointed out that these layoffs will affect the research laboratory in the Meta Group, which focuses on "Metaverse", as well as its applications, including "Instagram", "Facebook" and "WhatsApp".
In his letter to employees, Zuckerberg explained the reasons why the company reached its current position. He focused on the boom in the technical market since the beginning of the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, which caused a significant increase in corporate returns, which led to expectations that the steady growth rate of returns would continue even after the pandemic had passed, which was reflected in his decision to invest more in increasing the size of the company. .
But the case did not last, as Zuckerberg explained that the economic conditions began to decline, in conjunction with the intensification of competition, in addition to the decline in advertising spending, and all these factors led to the decline of “meta” returns to levels lower than what the founder of the company personally expected.
Meta's CEO wrote bluntly: "I got the indications wrong. I take full responsibility for that."
Zuckerberg identified a set of goals that the company will strive to achieve during the coming period, foremost of which is the shift towards more efficient capital spending, and directing the company’s human force towards priority growth areas, the most important of which is the development of an artificial intelligence-based content discovery engine, and the advertising sector, as well as Business sector platforms, along with the company's long-term vision for Metaverse.