Facebook Is Getting Slammed by Another Round of Brutal Cuts

The plight of the metamates continues.

Another One

The carnage at Meta-formerly-Facebook continues.

According to new reporting from The Wall Street Journal, Meta — which had already eliminated nearly 30 percent of its workforce over the past six or so months alone — will now fire another 10,000 of the company's still-standing employees.

"This will be a difficult time as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta," Meta's head of human resources, Lori Goler, told Meta employees in a Tuesday evening memo obtained by WaPo. "It will take time for everyone — both those leaving and those staying — to process tomorrow's news, and I know teams will show up for each other with compassion, support and care."

The cuts, per WaPo, will impact "highly-skilled" workers like engineers and other "technical staffers" who work in the company's product divisions, with Goler noting in her memo that staffers across Meta-owned WhatsApp, Facebook's Messenger, Instagram, and Reality Labs will be affected.

There seems to have been no mention of cuts to Meta's AI divisions. That's notable, considering that company CEO Mark Zuckerberg has in recent months made a sharp turn away from his beloved metaverse division to focus heavily on investor-pacifying generative AI.

Year of Efficiency

According to the report, this latest effort to cut jobs — and thus, costs — is part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "Year of Efficiency," a companywide effort to restructure the massive company, which as of November had boasted roughly 87,000 metamates in its ranks.

And while there's certainly an argument that Facebook, along with the several other Silicon Valley behemoths that made sweeping cuts last year, was a bit bloated, the now-several rounds of Meta layoffs has reportedly come at a serious morale cost, with one former employee comparing Meta's current internal state of the union to "'Hunger Games' meets 'Lord of the Flies.'"

To that end, Meta employees are seemingly coping however they must.

"On the eve of Meta layoffs, my team is focusing on things we can control," Daniel Conrad, a product manager at WhatsApp and Y Combinator alum, tweeted last night, with a photo of a bottle of Japanese whiskey.

In any case: layoffs suck. We're sure that getting laid off after surviving two recent — and also massive — firing rounds sucks especially bad, and we're sorry to anyone who was affected.

READ MORE: Meta to unveil fresh round of job cuts among highly skilled staff [The Washington Post]

More on former Facebook employees: Facebook's Former Metaverse Czar Publicly Shreds the Company’s Mistakes