Meta’s lingering layoffs enter their next phase


Mark Zuckerberg leaving a federal courthouse in San Jose in February 2022. | David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The company started notifying laid-off employees early Wednesday morning in the second recent round of mass cuts.

Meta conducted its second round of mass layoffs in the past six months on Wednesday, ahead of another set of layoffs planned for May.

The layoffs are a major cause for concern among Meta’s remaining staff, who are supposed to hear directly from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a company Q&A scheduled for Thursday at 11 am PT.

“You’ve shattered the morale and confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity. Why should we stay at Meta?” reads one of the most popular employee questions submitted on the company’s internal message board earlier today. Vox viewed a list of questions and spoke to several Meta employees who described ongoing dread about more layoffs to come.

As of Wednesday morning, other popular questions on the message board included, “Will there be more layoffs?” and “Did we ‘cut deep’ this time?”

The layoffs started early Wednesday morning and impacted a wide range of technical teams including those working on Facebook, Instagram, Reality Labs, and WhatsApp, according to an internal memo posted to an employee message board on Tuesday evening. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the memo sent on Tuesday night announcing the layoffs but declined to comment further. The cuts could be in the range of 4,000 jobs, one source said.

“This will be a difficult time as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta,” Lori Goler, Meta’s head of people, said in the memo.

Meta employees in North America were to be notified by email between 4 am and 5 am PT Wednesday morning, according to Goler’s note. Outside of North America, the timelines will vary country to country, and some countries will not be impacted.

Meta is also asking employees in North America, whose jobs allow it, to work from home on Wednesday to give people “space to process the news.”

The layoffs come after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March that the company would cut 10,000 more jobs in the coming months, after already cutting 11,000 in November. Zuckerberg previously said that cuts in April would impact tech departments, while another planned round of cuts in May will impact the business side of the company. At the end of last year, Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, had around 86,000 employees.

Sources spoke with Vox on the condition of anonymity because of concern about professional repercussions.

Meta’s continued layoffs are part of Zuckerberg’s plans for a “year of efficiency” in 2023. The layoffs are a reminder that after nearly two decades of almost uninterrupted growth, major tech companies like Meta are now undergoing an intense period of cutbacks and belt-tightening measures. Silicon Valley as a whole has been going through an economic downturn that has drastically changed what was once considered a free-spending work culture. Long gone are the days of unlimited perks, travel, and nonstop hiring. And in the past year, almost every major tech company has had rounds of layoffs. Meta’s have been particularly painful, with the company issuing the cuts in waves.

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post last month. “Over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates.”

While the stock market responded well to Meta’s layoffs last year, employee morale has suffered. Vox reported in January that internal employee sentiment surveys about optimism and confidence in leadership at the company were the lowest they had been in recent memory. Several sources described working in a state of limbo for the past few months and that it’s hard to get any work done.

“I think people are getting tired of all this and are just ignoring this now,” said one Meta employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. They added that it’s “too stressful to keep worrying when you can’t do anything about it”

Meta’s next round of cuts shows that this isn’t the end of tech layoffs — it’s only the beginning of the next wave.

Update, April 19, 6:20 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 18 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with further details about employee reactions to the layoffs.

Related articles

A Traditional Polish Easter Basket and Its Contents

Found this little gem on the internet…a Traditional Polish Easter Basket and its Contents courtesy of the Polish Falcons of America. Click here to view

‘I Don’t Think He’s Coming Back, Basically Ever’: Jeffrey Toobin Gives Grim Prediction for Fate of Mistakenly Deported Man

Jeffrey Toobin is not optimistic that Kilmar Abrego Garcia will be returned to the U.S. after the Trump administration said it mistakenly deported the Salvadoran national.

The post ‘I Don’t Think He’s Coming Back, Basically Ever’: Jeffrey Toobin Gives Grim Prediction for Fate of Mistakenly Deported Man first appeared on Mediaite.

Steve Priolo Joins Sabres Live! | Buffalo Bandits

Buffalo Bandits captain Steve Priolo joined Brian...

‘Political ransom’: Expert warns Trump trying to turn Harvard into Trump Univ. ‘satellite’



Former NAACP director Cornell William Brooks laid into President Donald Trump's move to freeze billions in federal funding from Harvard University, after the prestigious institution rejected his demands to crack down on the political ideology of its faculty and student body — a similar ultimatum Trump used against Columbia University that that school ultimately complied with.

"We have a wonderful Constitution that contains a First Amendment, which this government, this administration is violating," Brooks told CNN's John Berman. "This is to say, the government does not get to dictate political ideology. It does not get to determine whether faculty or staff or too liberal to conservative to this, to that. The First Amendment has a little something to say about that."

But there's another federal law standing in the way, he continued.

"Title XI is that law which says you can't use government funds to discriminate. This is a law that was brought into being as a consequence of the blood sacrifice of civil rights workers and African Americans, and this administration has taken that law, turned it upside down, and used it to try to micromanage Harvard and essentially make it a satellite campus of the now-defunct Trump University. This is outrageous."

ALSO READ: 'Alarming': Small colleges bullied into silence as Trump poses 'existential threat'

"But even if you buy your arguments, and even if you admit that the administration is trying to micromanage Harvard University, it is their money," said Berman. "How much will the absence of that money impact Harvard?"

"Well, first of all, let's — John, I want to be very clear about this," said Brooks. "It's not their money. It's the money of the American taxpayer ... and Harvard uses taxpayer money to do research on Alzheimer's, to do research on all manner of illnesses, to advance human knowledge, to send teachers into communities to teach. The point being here is the government, as in the Trump administration, doesn't get to use taxpayer dollars to violate the First Amendment."

"When you read the president of Harvard's letter ... it makes it very clear," he added. "Harvard is not refusing to comply with the government demands, simply out of a matter of personal prerogative, institutional prerogative. It is not doing so because the demands themselves are unlawful. They're unconstitutional. This is not the way government is supposed to behave. And if this were done to any major corporation, everyone would understand. You don't really get to micromanage business. I was a lawyer in the United States Justice Department. I served as president and CEO of the NAACP. I've overseen federal investigations with serious settlements and demand letters. This is not that. This is — this is literally political ransom."

Watch the video below or at the link here.

- YouTube www.youtube.com