On Wednesday, Meta layoffs employees from multiple teams in a bid to restructure and optimize its resources. A company spokesman told Reuters that these changes were necessary to align the company with its long-term location strategies.
“Today, a few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy,” a Meta spokesperson stated. “We are also moving some teams around from one location to another and some employees from one role to another.” “When a role is eliminated in a situation like this, we work hard to find other opportunities for impacted employees.”
According to The Verge, Meta layoffs reportedly affected teams working on Reality Labs, Instagram, and WhatsApp. However, Meta declined to specify how many employees in these divisions were reassigned or whose jobs were eliminated.
Meta layoffs hit multiple teams as company realigns resources
Jerome Pesenti, the head of Messenger parent company Meta’s AI unit NLP, is not the only notable figure laid off from the company on Wednesday: Jane Manchun Wong, a software engineer who has revealed unannounced features in Meta apps, is one of them. In 2023, Meta brought Wong onto the Threads team, an appointment rolled out with great fanfare by Meta leadership like CTO Andrew Bosworth and Instagram head Adam Mosseri.
A couple of former Meta employees, including Wong, also announced that they lost their jobs in the media. However, employees from Facebook’s recruiting, legal operations, and design departments posted that they were part of this latest Meta layoff. However, Meta later said Threads, recruiting, and legal operations were unaffected by the reorganization.
However, a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that those teams were not part of the Wednesday Meta layoffs reported earlier. The correction should have cleared up confusion regarding the company’s latest resource realignment in most impacted areas.
Reallocation and severance packages offered
Following its restructuring, Meta has offered affected employees the option to take new roles on new contracts or severance. Sources say some employees chose the package and received six weeks of severance pay. The message was reportedly delivered by video to more than a dozen employees on affected teams.
One former employee who spoke anonymously confirmed that their team was notified about the Meta layoffs in a virtual meeting. According to the employee, the process was quick, with the company offering severance and opportunities to be reassigned where possible.
History of Meta layoffs
This round of Meta layoffs follows a series of workforce reductions the company has implemented in recent years. In 2022, Meta layoffs roughly 13% of its workforce, equating to about 11,000 employees, as part of efforts to correct over-hiring during the pandemic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said users’ increased demand for Facebook services during the global crisis led to the company’s growth becoming too fast. He said he took responsibility for the layoffs.
This year, the tech giant went even further, cutting another 10,000 jobs and surging back another 5,000 open jobs that didn’t even exist. That was part of Meta’s broader effort to slim down operations and refocus resources on what matters most: Meta’s core products and our long-term vision.
Featured image credit: Mariia Shalabaieva/Unsplash Image credit: Furkan Demirkaya/Ideogram
