Meta is planning to lay off 5% of its underperforming employees, which will impact approximately 3,600 individuals.
1min read On Tuesday, January 14, Meta announced plans to lay off about 5% of its workforce, causing its stock to drop more than 2%. The company sent an internal memo to employees that showed it plans to cut about 5% of its workforce through performance-based layoffs and plans to hire new employees to fill those positions this year, according to the Shanghai Securities News, citing Bloomberg.
Meta has about 72,000 employees as of September 2024, which means the layoffs could affect about 3,600 positions.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the memo that he decided to raise the bar for performance management and to fire underperforming employees more quickly. "We typically fire people who don't meet expectations within a year, but this round of performance reviews will be a broader performance-based layoff," a person familiar with the matter told Reuters. Meta's performance cycle is expected to end in February.
The memo said affected US employees were expected to receive notice on February 10, while other employees would receive notice later. The laid-off employees were limited to those who had worked at the company long enough to be eligible for performance reviews. Zuckerberg told employees the company would "provide generous severance," consistent with past layoff policies.
Meta has already laid off several rounds of employees in recent years. In November 2022, it cut 11,000 employees, and a few months later, it cut about 10,000 more.
Before the latest layoff news, Meta and Zuckerberg had a dramatic week. Zuckerberg announced last week that Meta would scrap its fact-checking system to support free speech.
Meta announced on January 7 that it would terminate its third-party fact-checking program and adopt a user-written community annotation model, according to CCTV News. The program will first be implemented in the United States, replacing the previous independent third-party fact-checking service.
Meta announced late last week that it would cut its diversity, equity and inclusion team and cancel several related projects, marking another major policy shift.
This article is a compilation of CCTV News, Shanghai Securities News and Finance Unions.
