Meta prepares a massive layoff plan for this week

Visitors at the Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California. JUSTIN SULLIVAN (AFP)

Meta Platforms, Facebook's parent company, is scheduled to announce a massive layoff plan this week, according to sources familiar with the decision quoted by

on Sunday .

The measure, which will be communicated as of next Wednesday, would affect thousands of employees and occurs days after the largest cut in personnel suffered by Twitter, some 3,700 workers, half of the workforce, after the landing of Elon Musk in the company .

Meta's plan may exceed Twitter's in the number of layoffs, although not in percentage, according to the same sources, and it would be the first major workforce cut in Facebook's 18-year history.

The results of the company had already set off all the alarms at the end of October.

The group's profit contracted 52% in the third quarter of 2022, to 4,395 million dollars.

These numbers represented the second quarterly drop in revenue in its history.

Although the turnover amounted to 27,714, 4% less than in the same period of the previous year, the accounts caused a stock market crash, triggering the loss of a quarter of its value on the Stock Market, falling by 24.56%.

And that meant losing about 89,000 million dollars in a single day.

The cases of Meta and Twitter are different, but ultimately they are a symptom of the tribulations of the sector and, ultimately, of the deterioration that the economy is experiencing.

The traditional activities of Meta, which controls Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, among other applications, have stagnated and this has been compounded by competition from other social networks such as TikTok or Apple's blocking of advertising tracking.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the company, had already asked investors for patience, stating that it would take about a decade for Meta's efforts and its development of the metaverse to fully take off.

And weeks ago he announced, coinciding with the presentation of results, that in the next year the company will be very selective with its objectives.

“In 2023, we will focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas.

That means some work teams will grow significantly, but most will remain flat or shrink over the next year.

Collectively, we expect to end 2023 with the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than today,” he conceded.

“Although we face short-term challenges, the fundamentals are there to return to higher revenue growth.

We approach 2023 with a focus on prioritization and efficiency that will help us navigate the current environment and emerge as an even stronger company."

At the end of September, Meta had 87,314 employees, 28% more than the previous year.

Musk asks workers to come back

Meanwhile, within the frenzy that has been unleashed on Twitter since Elon Musk's takeover, specialized media have revealed that the company has begun to ask some of the laid-off workers to return.

In the company's Slack, the messaging and teamwork application, the company has posted the following message, as revealed by Platformer: "Sorry everyone [for disturbing] on the weekend, but I wanted to convey that we have the opportunity to ask some of those who were left out if they can come back.

I need to get the names and reasons together by Sunday at 4pm.”

"I'm going to do some research, but if any of you have been in contact with people who might come back and who we think would help us, please give the names before 4 tomorrow morning," he added.

According to Bloomberg, Twitter has already contacted dozens of laid-off employees and asked them to come back.

Some were mistakenly fired, according to two people familiar with the moves cited by the agency.

Others were fired before management realized their work and experience might be needed to create the new features Musk plans to launch, the same sources said, asking not to be identified because the information was private.

Twitter laid off about 3,700 people this week via email to cut costs.

Many employees learned they had lost their jobs after their access to company-wide systems, such as email and Slack, was suddenly suspended.

Employee return requests demonstrate how rushed and chaotic the process is.

Meanwhile, the tycoon continues commenting on his plans for Twitter on the social network itself.

One of his projects is to improve the search engine, he has said.

At the same time, he has warned that the account of those who impersonate another person will be permanently suspended, unless they make it clear in his profile that it is a parody account.

He has also assured that those who want to change their name after signing up for Twitter Blue to achieve the blue certification mark will lose this distinction.

According to

after registering the new service on Sunday at a price of $7.99 per month, Twitter has decided to suspend it until after the legislative elections this Tuesday, to prevent falsely certified accounts from sneaking in that could interfere in the electoral process.

Musk has not commented on the matter, although he has tweeted that "Twitter has to become, by far, the most accurate source of information about the world."

"That is our mission," he added.

The difficulty for the social network will be how to deal with the misinformation that frequently circulates on the network without compromising Musk's speech on freedom of expression, which he himself has already partially qualified.

To demonstrate his commitment to this principle, the tycoon has said that he will keep open the account that bothers him the most on the entire social network: “My commitment to freedom of expression even extends to not prohibiting the account that follows my plane, although that is a direct risk to personal safety,” he tweeted.

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