After weeks of speculation, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced massive layoff at Meta. The company, which runs Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, is letting go of 11,000 employees, or around 13 per cent of total headcount mostly Indians will be affected.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday confirmed that his company is firing thousands of employees. In a post on his company’s official website, Zuckerberg said that Meta was firing 11,000 employees, around 13 per cent of its total strength. The Meta move came just days after Twitter, which had been acquired by Elon Musk, fired almost 50 per cent of its employees.
Although the manner in which the two social media giants have gone about their layoff process is different. Zuckerberg says that the decision to let go of so many employees in one go is the most difficult the company has made so far. Just to give you context, Meta is the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
The job cuts at Meta are impacting its employees in its offices across the world. This means that, in India too, Meta is laying off some employees. “Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13 per cent and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1,” the Meta CEO said in the official blog post.
Zuckerberg says that it is on his watch that Meta is asking thousands of employees to go and he takes full responsibility for it. He wrote, “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”
The company has removed access to most Meta systems for impacted people in the layoffs given the amount of access to sensitive information. “But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell,” Zuckerberg added.
16-week severance pay for Meta employees
The Meta CEO said that employees in the US will get severance pay for 16 weeks, plus two “additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap”. Affected employees will get all remaining PTO time, November 15, 2022 vesting, cost of healthcare for them and families for six months, and three months of career support with an external vendor (including early access to unpublished job leads).
