Meta to cut 11,000 jobs worldwide as ad revenue slumps

The social media giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is reducing its workforce by around 13% in its first ever round of redundancies.

The dramatic cull comes after Meta’s workforce peaked this year at 87,314.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the cuts were “some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history”.

Zuckerburg emailed staff on Wednesday morning informing them of the redundancies. He said that revenue growth experienced during the coronavirus pandemic had not been sustained along with advertising performance and e-commerce both declining.

“Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected,” he said.

“Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”

Affected staff will have access to Meta systems revoked on Wednesday, except for access to email so outgoing staff can “say farewell”.

Meta will start laying off staff in Ireland on Wednesday.

In 2022, both Meta reported its poorest quarterly earnings report since going public. Investors wiped more than $89bn (£77bn) from the company’s market capitalisation in last month after Meta posted declining revenues.

The move comes after massive lay-offs at Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover.

Twitter laid off over 3,000 staff, nearly 50% of its workforce, in a bid to slim down the social media company after he revealed brands had begun pulling their advertisements, leading to what he said was a “massive drop in revenue”.

Musk tweeted late Friday the cuts were needed as “unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4m/day”.

Twitter staff were told on Thursday through a company-wide memo that they would receive an email to their personal email accounts if they were being fired.

But before the emails were due to arrive, Before those emails arrived, employees began posting on Twitter that they were locked out of their work accounts.

Twitter is now facing a class action lawsuit from former employees who say they were not given enough notice under US federal law that they had lost their jobs.

Michael McCartney, Employment Partner at Fladgate said: “Meta’s announcement that it plans to make significant job cuts in response to the current macro-economic environment comes very soon after similar cuts were imposed by Elon Musk following his purchase of Twitter, demonstrating that there is a real impact on advertising revenues in the social media sphere.

“It would [be] surprising if either company adopted the approach P&O Ferries deployed recently when it sacked 800 seafarer without prior warning. This is because UK employment law requires an employer to consult with elected representatives (or Trade Unions if there are any recognised) for a minimum period of 30 days, where it envisages 20 or more redundancies and, for at least 45 days, if that number exceeds 100 redundancies.

“The company is also required to send a notice called an HR1 form to the UK government and if it fails to do this, its directors run the risk of criminal liabilities.”