Facebook owner, Meta will chop 10,000 more jobs as tech layoffs worsen

MENLO PARK — Facebook owner Meta Platforms said Tuesday it will chop another 10,000 jobs and hold off on filling thousands of open positions in a fresh round of brutal layoffs for the Bay Area’s tech sector.

Based on the Bay Area impact of Meta’s prior round of job cuts of 11,000 layoffs, undertaken last November, the tech titan’s local workforce could face staffing reductions of thousands more positions. The earlier layoffs triggered plans for more than 2,500 job cuts in the Bay Area.

“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platform’s chief executive officer and co-founder, said in an online post on Tuesday. “It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success.”

Meta’s announcement arrives at the same time that a report shows the job markets in both the Bay Area and California, including tech-heavy metro areas such as Santa Clara County and the San Francisco-San Mateo region, have fully recovered from the mammoth job losses that occurred at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic.

But the newly disclosed staffing reductions by the owner of the Facebook app extend what has become a wrenching wave of layoffs for tech and biotech workers in the Bay Area.

Since mid-2022, tech and biotech companies have revealed plans to eliminate well over 22,000 jobs in the Bay Area, cutbacks being triggered by multiple factors.

In many instances, the layoffs represent the tech sector’s over-hiring during the coronavirus outbreak, when a push to work and learn from home or other remote locations spurred a huge surge in demand for tech services and products.

As the economic disruptions unleashed by the coronavirus have ebbed, so has demand for what tech companies produce.

In other cases, some tech and biotech companies had to cut staff due to failed or poor business models.

The layoffs by Meta Platforms last November produced some of the largest job cuts for Bay Area workers in the current round of staffing reductions by tech and biotech firms.

The company is far from the only one moving to lay off workers. The latest layoffs include a disclosure by Salesforce that it would eliminate another 55 jobs in San Francisco, effective May 9.

Besides the 10,000 layoffs, Meta Platforms made it clear that it was reining in hiring in a big way at the company. About 5,000 open positions won’t be filled, Zuckerberg stated in his post.

“Over the next couple of months, organization leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our organizations, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates,” Zuckerberg stated. “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 (Wednesday) whether they’re impacted.”

Meta Platforms didn’t immediately reveal the precise locations of its latest round of reductions.

This current round of layoffs at Meta Platforms might be ongoing for months to come this year.

“We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May,” Zuckerberg said. “In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes.”

The new cutbacks are part of what Meta Platforms is calling its “Year of Efficiency.”

“While I know many of you are energized by this, I also recognize that the idea of upcoming org changes creates uncertainty and stress,” Zuckerberg said. “My hope is to make these org changes as soon as possible in the year so we can get past this period of uncertainty and focus on the critical work ahead.”

Meta Platforms is attempting to transform itself into a “flatter” and “leaner” company that is more efficient, Zuckerberg said.

Yet he also warned that the lean times for the tech company might not be over quickly. The economy and job market could sour, he suggested.

“We should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years,” Zuckerberg said. “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.”

Zuckerberg also acknowledged that Meta Platforms has been sobered by its forced retrenchment.

“Last year was a humbling wake-up call,” Zuckerberg said. “The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably. We scaled back budgets, shrunk our real estate footprint and made the difficult decision to lay off 13% of our workforce.”