Even as many companies look to cut costs in fears of a looming recession, some of the most widespread layoffs have been in the tech sector.
In 2022, the tech industry has cut more than 150,000 jobs as post-pandemic demand faded while the new year began with widespread job cuts at companies such as Google (GOOGL), Salesforce (CRM) and Amazon (AMZN) — the 18,000 workers the latter laid off between November and January was the largest since the e-commerce giant's launch in 1994.
DON'T MISS: Meta Unveils New Round of 10,000 Job Cuts Amid Tech Sector Hiring Slump
In March 2023, Meta (META) became the latest to announce plans to reduce its global workforce by 10,000 people and close out the 5,000 open positions that it had on its site.
At its peak in 2022, the tech platform had been employing 87,000 people and had already slashed 11,000 jobs by November.
New Job Cut Round Affects Facebook, Whatsapp And Instagram Workers
While some workers affected by the layoff plans in March received their notice immediately, upwards of an additional 4,000 will get them on Wednesday, April 19.
A company-wide memo first reported by Bloomberg News informed managers that employees across Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Reality Lab behind Meta's Quest software would be affected while many of the existing teams would be reorganized based on who remains.
"It’s about to be Hunger Games out here," one worker wrote on the Blind workplace social media app used by Meta.
"My partner works [in the affected divisions] and we are pretty worried," another employee reported seeing written on Blind to the New York Post.
The memo also reportedly told employees across the United States and Canada to work from home if they are able to do so in order to "process" the news. By the morning of April 17, workers across the engineering, graphics programming and marketing departments started announcing that they had been laid off on LinkedIn.
"This will be tough and there's no way around that," chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a company announcement when plans for the job cuts were first announced. "It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success."
Meta Stock Falls Upon Layoff News
While Meta stock surged when layoffs and other cost-cutting measures were first announced back in March, news of the memo sent it downward 1.23% to $251.20 by the morning of April 19.
Reporting a $9.4 billion loss that at one point made it the worst performer out of all the companies in the S&P 500, Meta had a dismal 2022 as demand for digital advertisement fell and the company's lofty expectations for the metaverse started to look more and more risky.
In November 2022, stock fell below $90 to a seven-year low and this is what pushed Zuckerberg to declare that 2023 would be "the year of efficiency" — a codeword that often means to cut anything that is not bringing in profit. Other plans include asking workers with specific engineering and coding skills to work directly on product rather than management.
"After restructuring, we plan to lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group," Zuckerberg wrote in the March 2023 memo. "Other relevant efficiency timelines include targeting this summer to complete our analysis from our hybrid work year of learning so we can further refine our distributed work model."
