“This is one of the hardest changes we’ve made in the history of Meta,” conceded Mark Zuckerberg, Wednesday, November 9, announcing 11,000 layoffs in the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which he founded in 2004. This wave of layoffs, which represents 13% of the 87,000 employees, is not certainly not the most important in the tech sector. Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has just cut its workforce in half. But the departures at Meta are the most important social plan of recent years in absolute value in this industry. It is also symbolic: it is the first time that the company, founded eighteen years ago, has dismissed. For Mr. Zuckerberg, this is a setback.
“I want to take responsibility for this decision and the reasons that made us come to this,” the 38-year-old executive wrote in a letter to employees, saying he was ” sorry ” for licensees. Dismissed employees will receive four months of compensation, plus fifteen days per year of seniority and their health insurance will be retained for six months. But all of them had their computer access to company data cut off immediately, for the sake of ” security “, like on Twitter.
To explain the situation, Zuckerberg admitted to having made a ” mistake “ analysis, having invested too much after the Covid-19 pandemic, due to the increase in online uses and e-commerce. “Many people – including me – predicted that this acceleration would be permanent. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out the way I expected: not only did e-commerce return to its previous trend, but macroeconomic depression, increased competition, and the loss of important signals for advertising caused our income to fall much lower than I had anticipated,” argues the leader, alluding to the success of the social network TikTok or the limitation of advertising targeting by Apple.
negative spiral
Meta is certainly not the only company affected by these headwinds: in addition to Twitter, the transport service Lyft and the Stripe payment solution will lay off more than 10% of their employees. Having grown to 1.6 million employees, Amazon has just announced a « pause » hirings. Even TikTok has reorganized and laid off a few executives due to the economic downturn, according to the Financial Times. The tech sector has already cut more than 100,000 jobs this year, more than the 80,000 in 2020, the year of the pandemic, according to the Layoffs site.
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