Meta announces cuts to staff in drive to improve efficiency

Meta has announced plans to reduce its staff by around 10,000 people and close around 5,000 additional open roles as part of its ‘Year of Efficiency’, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said.

Last November, Meta announced its most significant round of layoffs ever, saying it planned to eliminate 13% of its staff, amounting to more than 11,000 employees.

Now, the company has announced a second wave of job cuts and the intention to cancel lower priority projects: all with the aim of improving the company’s financial performance in a difficult environment, enabling it to ‘execute its long term vision’.

Building a leaner, more technical company

“As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs — and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long term vision,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote in a post to employees also published on the company’s website.

“A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster. People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That’s why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organization as lean as possible.”

The company also said it would be investing in tools to help it become more efficient, such as AI. As Mr Zuckerber wrote, the company is focused on the long term. “That means investing in tools that will make us most effective over many years, not just this year — whether that’s building AI tools to help engineers write better code faster, enabling us to automate workloads over time, or identifying obsolete processes that we can phase out,” he said.

The latest news of job cuts in the technology sector follows the announcement in January that Google parent company Alphabet would cut 12,000 jobs and that Microsoft would cut 10,000 jobs, with both companies saying the moves would enable a focus on AI.