BREAKING: Facebook Parent Company Meta Forced to Fire Thousands, Cites ‘Difficult Economic Environment’ Created by Biden

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced on Tuesday that it would be firing 10,000 employees, or 13 percent of its workforce, in an effort to cut costs and make the company more efficient. 

“Meta is building the future of human connection, and today I want to share some updates on our Year of Efficiency that will help us do that,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a memo announcing the move. “The goals of this work are: (1) to make us a better technology company and (2) to improve our financial performance in a difficult environment so we can execute our long-term vision.”

Amongst those affected will be the recruiting teams, as well as the company’s tech and business employees. In addition to the cuts, the CEO announced that he will be closing 5,000 open job listings.

“Here’s the timeline you should expect: 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,” Zuckerberg explained. “With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted.”

“We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May,” he continued, adding, “In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes. Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.”

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” he added.

The head of Meta went on to explain that following the restructuring of these teams, hiring and transfers would resume. The move by Zuckerberg is part of his “year of efficiency” in which he plans to make the company leaner in order to improve the company’s financial performance while maintaining or improving product quality.

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“Flatter is faster,” he explained. “It’s well-understood that every layer of a hierarchy adds latency and risk aversion in information flow and decision-making. Every manager typically reviews work and polishes off some rough edges before sending it further up the chain. In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management.”

This isn’t the first time CEO Zuckerberg has been forced to lay off thousands. Back in November, the company announced that it would be firing 11,000 employees, according to The New York Times.

Zuckerberg cited these firings as a positive development for the company, writing that it has resulted in faster development and completion of projects: “Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects.”

In addition to emphasizing a lean, more efficient company, Zuckerberg underscored that many of these changes are occurring due to the current economic environment in which Meta is operating. He particularly emphasized the role of higher interest rates which have been used to tackle inflation in recent years.

“At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years,” Zuckerberg wrote. “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. Given this outlook, we’ll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success.”

It is clear that the current economic environment is having a detrimental impact on Facebook’s operating costs and ability to stay afloat. These firings are yet another symptom of the Biden administration’s overspending over the past few years as high inflation rates and high-interest rates have heavily impacted the ability to do business.

“Change is never easy,” Zuckerberg wrote in conclusion, adding, “but I know we’ll get through this and come out an even stronger company that can build better products faster and enable you to do the best work of your careers.”

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