Facebook parent company, Meta Platforms, announced Tuesday that it will fire 10,000 employees in a second round of mass layoffs.
This comes as the Big Tech industry braces for a deep economic downturn, reported Al Jazeera.
Meta said that it will reduce the size of its recruiting team and make more cuts in its tech groups next month. Its business groups will see cuts in late May.
The U.S-based company has been working on a wider restructuring. It will also see the firm cancel hiring plans for 5,000 openings. Lower-priority projects will be canceled and layers of middle management will be flattened.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to his staff on Facebook that this will be "tough and there's no way around that."
He shared that it will mean saying goodbye to "talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success."
Zuckerberg also warned employees that his company's cost-cutting efforts will continue for years, as per Business Insider.
He said that at this point, he thinks that his team should prepare for the possibility that "this new economic reality will continue for many years."
He shared that tough economic conditions are to be blamed for the layoffs.
He said that higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, "more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation."
He noted that given this outlook, they will need to operate "more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success."
Due to rising interest rates, there have been worries of an economic downturn. This has led to a series of mass job cuts across corporate America. Big Tech firms like Amazon and Microsoft, and Wall Street banks have all been affected.
Meta has been spending a lot of money to build the futuristic metaverse. It has struggled with a post-pandemic slump in advertising spending from firms that are worried about the economic outlook.
Last month, the company mentioned its falling profits and its third consecutive quarter of declining revenue.
After the layoffs, Meta expects expenses this year to come in between $86 billion and $92 billion. It is lower than the $89 billion to $95 billion forecast previously.
Meta's shares jumped 6% in early trading on the news of the job cuts.
In the first mass layoffs in its 18-year history, the company slashed its workforce by 11,000 in November 2022.
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