Meta lays off 11,000 workers; Zuckerberg says his investments didn’t pay off

Meta is laying off 11,000 employees, about 13 percent of its workforce, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a message to staff today. Zuckerberg said his previous decision to increase spending didn't pay off as he thought it would and that Meta's "revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year." Meta had 87,314 employees as of September 30, 2022, an increase of 28 percent over the previous 12 months.

"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended," Zuckerberg wrote. "I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. 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."

The company formerly known as Facebook already "cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint," Zuckerberg wrote. Meta is also "restructuring teams to increase our efficiency" and "cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1," but "these measures alone won't bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth," he wrote.