Zuckerberg speaks out on Meta's newly announced layoffs

Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Meta Platforms Inc, shared a message destined for Meta employees following the announcement of 11.000 staff member layoffs.

Published on Meta’s official website on November 9, Zuckerberg explained that these are some of the most difficult changes made in Meta’s history.  

“I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go,” said Mark, explaining that the tech giant is taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending.

Mark declared taking full accountability for the decisions leading to these layoffs.

“I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted,” announced Meta’s founder.

To thoroughly explain how the company got there, Mark said that at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth.

This led many people, Zuckebreg included, to believe that there would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. 

Meta then decided to significantly increase the company’s investments.

“Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” explained Mark.

Meta has now shifted its resources onto a smaller number of high-priority growth areas, like its AI discovery engine, ads and business platforms, and its long-term vision for the metaverse.

Mark further explained that the company cut costs across its business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking real estate footprint.

“We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go.”

Zuckerberg then explained how the company will proceed with the layoffs, from paying 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, covering the cost of healthcare for people and their families for six months, to providing three months of career support with an external vendor, including early access to unpublished job leads.

The news comes at the heels of Elon Musk’s recent decision to layoff a significant amount of Twitter employees only days after taking over the social media platform.