Meta To Lay Off 5% Of Workforce

The parent company of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, Meta is set to cut about 5 percent of its workforce, targeting the company’s lowest-performing staffers.

Meta’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Mark Zuckerberg, informed employees about the decision to “move out low performers faster” in a memo posted on Tuesday on the company’s internal Workplace forum.

“Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies in the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform, and the future of social media. This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Zuckerberg told employees that 2025 would “be an intense year.”

Zuckerberg emphasised that the company plans to “raise the bar on performance management” and accelerate the process of moving out low performers.

He stated that, while the company typically manages underperforming employees over the course of a year, this time they would be making more extensive, performance-based cuts during this cycle.

“We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of backfilling these roles in 2025,” Zuckerberg said.

The company specified that it is “exiting approximately 5% of our lowest performers” in a separate message posted by a company director.

Meta has more than 72,000 employees, according to its most recent quarterly report.

Meta said employees affected by the layoffs will be notified by February 10 and receive severance in line with what the company has provided previously.

The cuts represent Meta’s largest layoffs since it eliminated 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.

The company has yet to provide specifics on how many employees will be impacted, but this reduction will be a substantial one, affecting thousands of workers across various departments.

Zuckerberg reassured employees that those who are let go will receive generous severance packages.

“We won’t manage out everyone who didn’t meet expectations for the last period if we’re optimistic about their future performance, and for those we do let go, we’ll provide generous severance in line with what we provided with previous cuts,” he stated.