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(The Hill) – Meta is set to lay off thousands of employees this week, as it looks to downsize amid sliding stock prices, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The layoffs could be the largest ever for Facebook’s parent company, according to the report, with the number of employees expected to surpass even the major reductions at Twitter last week. However, with Facebook’s headcount of more than 87,000, it will be a smaller portion of its total workforce.
Other tech companies, like Amazon, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet, have also been announcing layoffs and instituting hiring freezes as the sector continues to feel the pressures of high prices and the looming possibility of a recession.
The industry, which thrived in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, is seeing slowing profits in the post-COVID-19 economic landscape.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the layoffs but referred The Hill to recent comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas. So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year,” Zuckerberg said on the company’s last earnings call.
“In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today,” he added.
The ride-hailing service Lyft announced last week it would cut 13 percent of employees, and the online payment giant Stripe said it’s laying off 14 percent of its employees.
Former staff members have sued over Twitter’s move to lay off 3,700 employees in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of the company.
