Rumor: Meta may fire thousands of people this week

Tech giant Meta may start a layoff this week, in which thousands of people will lose their jobs. That writes the business newspaper The Wall Street Journal. The company, previously called Facebook, has never done that before.

It would be more people in total than Twitter, where about 3700 people lost their jobs, writes The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper does not know exactly how many people it would be. The move is necessary because the company’s costs have risen a lot in recent years. The company now employs approximately 87,000 people.

Meta director Mark Zuckerberg already said during the discussion of the quarterly figures some weeks ago. “Some teams will grow significantly, but many other teams will remain the same or shrink in the coming year. All in all, we expect to end 2023 with about the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than today.”

Not only did the business newspaper hear that the layoff may start on Wednesday, but it also picked up that employees have been told to cancel non-essential travel this week. According to the newspaper, this points to the arrival of big news.

Last year, Meta focused mainly on the development of metaverse products, something the company invests billions of dollars in every year. Last month, the Meta Quest Pro was released, a VR headset that should bring the metaverse a step closer with, among other things, eye and face tracking.