Elon Musk’s Twitter layoff may have received sharp criticisms from the global community but it may not be the only tech firm that has decided to hand over termination slips to its employees.
After social media giant Twitter, Facebook-parent Meta has become the latest tech firm to reduce its workforce. This decision which will affect thousands of employees is claimed to have been made as a part of a cost-cutting strategy as a consequence of dismal profitability and a decline in sales.
In late September, Meta Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg informed the staff members about the decision of the organisation to reduce expenditure by scaling back its manpower force and reorganising the teams.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) claims that, during the executive call, Zuckerberg took full accountability for the organisation’s downturn and claimed that the over-optimism about growth led to overstaffing.
Lor Goler, the company’s head of human resources said that employees who will be terminated will be provided with a severance pay of at least four months of salary.
As of September 30, the company had over 87,000 employees globally across its different platforms, including social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and the messaging platform WhatsApp. The layoff is expected the cuts to touch around 10% of its workforce. The tech firm has been reporting a steep slowdown in digital advertising revenue as a repercussion of the global economic downturn, rising interest rates and regulatory struggles.
Major tech firms like Alphabet and Amazon have also frozen hiring in corporate firms owing to the economic slowdown and recession fears. Reports claim that many more employees of Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, and Snap, among others might also face the same fate in the upcoming days.
Tech giant Microsoft has sacked around 1000 employees in what was the third round of downsizing at the company this year. Netflix sacked nearly 500 employees this year and in August, Snapchat sacked over 1000 people.
Despite the fact that tech businesses saw a huge boom in revenue during the pandemic, the profit projections were impermanent.
Apple’s privacy update is said to have cost Meta, in particular, more than $10 billion in lost ad revenue and Google’s ad business is also said to have been facing the same fate.
