Billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg says earnings drop and huge staff cull “are on me”
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Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, began firing staff on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The company announced that it would sack up to 11,000 staff.
The reductions come as part of the first major effort to cut costs since the founding of Facebook in 2004. The drastic measure follows a sharp slowdown in digital advertising revenue and disappointing earnings for the company.
The unnamed sources told the media that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had admitted his responsibility for the problems, telling executives on Tuesday that the issues the group faces “are on me.”
According to a separate report by Insider, the reductions will affect about 10% of the company, which employed over 87,000 people as of September 30.
In September, Zuckerberg warned employees that Meta intended to reduce its expenses and restructure its teams.
“This is obviously a different mode than we’re used to operating in,” Zuckerberg said in a Q&A session with employees at the time. “For the first 18 years of the company, we basically grew quickly basically every year, and then more recently our revenue has been flat to slightly down for the first time. So we have to adjust.”
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Big Tech tightens belt amid global economic woes
The layoffs come amid similar steps taken by tech rivals. Snap is scaling back as well, saying in August that it would eliminate 20% of its workforce, while Twitter fired around 50% of its employees following the sale of the company to Elon Musk.
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