Meta to lay off another 10,000 as Zuckerberg celebrates “year of efficiency”

Meta plans to lay off another 10,000 employees and will stop trying to fill 5,000 open roles, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff in a memo today.

Zuckerberg titled the memo "Update on Meta's Year of Efficiency" and used the first two paragraphs to tout improvements to the Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp owner's operations. In the third paragraph, employees reading the memo found out that 10,000 of them will lose their jobs in the coming months.

"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," Zuckerberg wrote.

Today's news comes three months after the announcement of Meta's previous layoff round that targeted 11,000 employees. Meta had over 87,000 employees before the layoffs announced in November, and most of those cuts weren't yet reflected in the company's Q4 2022 earnings report. By the time both rounds of layoffs are complete, Meta should be down to about 66,000 employees.

The first sentence of today's Zuckerberg layoff memo said, "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." He went on to describe "several parallel workstreams to improve organizational efficiency, dramatically increase developer productivity and tooling, optimize distributed work, garbage collect unnecessary processes, and more."

In Q4 2022, Meta reported $32.2 billion of revenue and $4.7 billion of net income. For the full year, revenue was $116.6 billion and net income was $23.2 billion.

Zuckerberg: “Leaner is better”

In today's memo, Zuckerberg said the November 2022 staff cuts taught him that "leaner is better."

"Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster," he wrote. "In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects... A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster. People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That's why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organization as lean as possible."

After noting that further efficiency improvements will require more staff cuts, Zuckerberg wrote:

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. 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. 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.

"This will be tough and there's no way around that. It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success," Zuckerberg wrote. After the layoffs, Meta will "lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group," he wrote.