Meta is planning for a large scale layoff this week: Report

Meta, the parent company of Facebook is planning to scale back its workforce, with plans to layoff thousands of employees this week. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, an announcement on the same can be expected as early as Wednesday.

The company in October forecasted a weak holiday quarter and significantly higher costs next year, wiping $67 billion off Meta's stock market value, adding to the loss of more than half a trillion dollars this year.

Meta's profits for the third quarter declined 52 percent at $4.4 billion, as compared to the period a year ago. Over the past year, the company's market value has declined to $600 billion.

According to Meta's latest report, as of September 30, it had approximately 87,000 employees worldwide that work across its various platforms, which consist of Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp.

Earlier in June, Zuckerberg warned employees that the coming recession would lead to a reduction in engineering jobs by at least 30 percent at the social media company.

"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. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organisation than we are today" Mark Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call in late October.

Earlier this month, Meta’s shareholder, Altimeter Capital Management wrote to Mark Zuckerberg that Meta needs to streamline by reducing jobs and capital expenditures, adding that it ramped up spending and pivoted to the metaverse as Meta has lost investor confidence.

Now with this announcement, Meta has joined the list of major Silicon Valley companies including Microsoft Corp, Twitter Inc, and Snap Inc who have announced job cuts recently due to rising interest rates, rising inflation, and the European energy crisis which have caused the global economy to slow down.