Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the social media behemoth will be reducing his global workforce by 5%, warning that 2025 is going to be an ‘intense year’. 
In a memo sent to employees, Zuckerberg declared that he was going to move out ‘low-performers’ faster than normal.
Meta has 72,000 employees globally, so if you do the maths on that then 3,600 people are going to lose their jobs.
Zuckerberg has come in for intense criticism following his decision to ditch third-party fact checkers in favour of a community notes model adopted by rival social media platform X, which is owned by Elon Musk.
He also terminated the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The announcement from Meta is just the latest in a whole host of job casualties in the technology sector over the last 6 months, despite all the hype and optimism over the opportunities presented by nascent technologies such as Generative AI, many tech companies are reducing their headcount.
Meta and other technology behemoths are investing heavily in AI, whilst Zuckerberg’s bet on the Metaverse didn’t really pay off, and the company is still reeling from the investment lost on those projects.
Meta employees in the United States, who are impacted by the job cuts will be notified by February 10th, while those in other countries worldwide will be informed at a later date.
In the memo that was first reported on by Bloomberg, Zuckerberg said with an intense year expected he wanted only the ‘best’ people on his teams.
“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management. We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle. This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams,” said Zuckerberg.
