Meta Platforms has reportedly commenced the last of a three-part series of job cuts.
That’s according to a Wednesday (May 24) report by Reuters, citing a source familiar with the matter. The layoffs were part of a plan announced in March to eliminate 10,000 positions.
The report notes that a number of employees in Meta’s marketing, recruiting, engineering and corporate communications department posted status updates on LinkedIn Wednesday to announce that they had been let go.
Meta announced a 13% reduction in its workforce last November, and then followed those cuts with another round announced in March, amid what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called the company’s “year of efficiency.”
And as reported here at the beginning of February, “efficiency” has been Meta’s watchword recently, with the term coming up dozens of times during an earnings call.
“We’ve entered a phase change for the company … we will be more proactive about cutting projects and increasing efficiency around executing our top priorities,” Zuckerberg told investors.
PYMNTS wrote that this new focus “could help lessen concerns that the company is overspending on its virtual reality ambitions.”
Concern among investors that Zuckerberg and his company were spending too much time focused on the metaverse at expense of Meta’s core business helped fuel a 64% drop in the company’s shares last year, the weakest performance in its history. Meta saw about $700 billion of its market value evaporate between October 2021 and October 2022.
Meta’s job eliminations are part of a larger wave of layoffs in the tech sector, which is itself part of a broader pattern in the job market.
Amazon announced plans to cut 18,000 positions in January, while Lyft recently said it would reduce its staff levels by 26% as the rideshare company looks to gain “operating cost savings.”
As PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, companies are looking to preserve operating margins and make their profitability-focused investors happy, which has led to job cuts at businesses that expanded their headcounts during the pandemic, such as Meta and Amazon.
News of Meta’s latest layoffs came one day after reports that the company was selling Giphy to Shutterstock for $53 million.
Meta had announced last year that it would sell Giphy, which it purchased for $315 million in 2020, following an order from the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The CMA said ruled last year that it had “found that Meta’s takeover of Giphy could allow Meta to limit other social media platforms’ access to GIFs, making those sites less attractive to users and less competitive.”
The authority also determined that the deal took Giphy out of the competition as a potential challenger in the British display advertising sector.
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