As the Wall Street Journal reports, the announcement of those layoffs is expected to arrive on Wednesday, November 9, and company officials have already “told employees to cancel non-essential travel beginning this week.” The planned layoffs will be the first time Meta, which was formerly known as Facebook, has made major headcount reductions since it was founded 18 years ago. At the end of September 2022, Meta reported that it had more than 87,000 employees worldwide. While the job cuts do not appear to be as large a percentage of the total workforce as Twitter last week, the number of employees appears to be larger than the up to 3,700 employees Twitter plans to lay off. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment and instead referred the WSJ to an earlier statement by Mark Zuckerberg that the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas.” “That means some groups will grow substantially, but most other groups will remain flat or shrink over the next year,” Zuckerberg said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 26. “Overall, we expect to end 2023 as either about the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.” Meta has cut its workforce in some divisions in a much smaller way, and Zuckerberg even told employees at a company meeting in June 2022 that “realistically, there are probably a lot of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.” . This bad news follows Meta’s quarterly earnings which revealed that its Reality Labs division, which covers its VR, XR and metaverse efforts, posted a $3.7 billion loss from operations. Reality Labs has lost $9.4 billion so far this year, and that’s even higher than the $6.9 billion it lost in the same period in 2021. Meta recently announced the $1,499 Meta Quest Pro VR headset, and its focus on creating Horizon Worlds, which, according to the Internet, isn’t in a place that doesn’t currently attract many people, has been a point of contention. The WSJ reports that Horizon Worlds has well under 200,000 users this year. Do you have a tip for us? Want to discuss a potential story? Send an email to [email protected] Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
