Meta's Townhall: Mark Zuckerberg Updates On Layoffs, Hiring and Incentives

Meta Platforms, Inc META CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees that he would not rule out future layoffs and does not expect the social-media company to hire as quickly as before in a virtual Q&A session Thursday, a day after the company completed its latest round of layoffs.

Zuckerberg told employees that about 4,000 employees, primarily in the company’s tech divisions, were affected by the latest cuts, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Since November, Meta has said it would lay off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce.

Meta let go of 75% of its information problems engineering team, which helps enable fact-checking and addresses misinformation claims related to elections globally. Meta merged the remaining team into a larger group within Facebook’s integrity operations.

The Zuckerberg-led company will backfill the vacated positions, and Zuckerberg told employees not to expect more than 1% - 2% year over year from this point forward.

The job cuts appear to have been relatively light within Reality Labs, the virtual and augmented reality division. Conversely, the company made far-steeper staff reductions in portions of Meta devoted to content quality and user experience.

Meta expects to complete most of the layoffs for 2023 in May, as planned, but he also said that it is hard to predict what will happen in 2024, 2025, and beyond. It plans to axe over 10% of its U.K. workforce and ditch Instagram’s new hub in London.

Meta proposes eliminating at least 687 jobs, primarily in London, with yet more among its U.K. staff of about 5,000 at risk of redundancy, Financial Times reports.

It looks to slash 250 jobs at the Instagram team in London, the hardest hit, though others will have the chance to move to New York. Meta’s main offices in Menlo Park, California, will serve as the headquarter for Instagram too.

Meta’s U.K. cuts will also affect about 55 jobs across apps like WhatsApp and Facebook, and nearly 60 across its Reality Labs, tasked with delivering the metaverse, and its artificial intelligence teams. Other affected areas included monetization, advertising, data scientists, designers, and user experience, researchers. 

Insiders have described the job-cuts strategy in London as a “scattergun approach,” selecting teams at random to be made redundant.

Also, Meta has been “shrinking” its “real estate footprint” to cut costs and reduced its presence in leased offices in the U.S. While it opened new offices in King’s Cross in central London in March 2022, it is looking to sublet a 310,000 square-feet office in Fitzrovia that it leased in 2021 and never moved into.

Price Action: META shares traded lower by 1.11% at $201.70 premarket on the last check Friday.