Layoff fears as Facebook parent Meta announces hiring freeze | dead

Meta employees have been warned of possible layoffs after Facebook The parent company announced Thursday that it would freeze hiring and “further restructure,” Bloomberg News reported.

In the company’s communications with employees, CEO Mark Zuckerberg He referred to the uncertain macroeconomic environment for changes. The announcement comes after many tech companies have had to cut staff in recent months, as advertisers cut back spending in anticipation of a recession.

“I would have liked the economy to stabilize more clearly at the moment, but from what we’re seeing it doesn’t seem to have happened yet, so we want to plan fairly conservatively,” Zuckerberg told employees during a weekly question-and-answer session. reported the news.

Reuters reported in June that the social media company had cut its plans to hire engineers by at least 30% this year. The company confirmed the hiring freeze in broad terms in May, but exact numbers have not been previously reported. dead He declined to comment but shared a statement on an earnings call in July in which Zuckerberg said restructuring would be a more priority this quarter.

“Our plan is to reduce employee growth steadily over the next year,” he said. “Many teams are going to shrink so we can shift energy to other areas, and I wanted to give our leaders the ability to decide within their teams where to multiply, where to refill attrition, and where to restructure teams while reducing strikes to long-term initiatives.”

Zuckerberg also said Thursday that Meta will cut budgets across most teams, and that individual teams will have to work out how to handle staffing changes, the report added.

The technology industry was suffers from slowing down In recent months, after a sudden surge in success that has accelerated during the pandemic. Amid the broader global economic slowdown, rising interest rates, and regulatory struggles, many tech companies are slowing or stopping hiring.

Google parent company Alphabet announce The hiring freeze will start from July 20 and Apple has said it will start slow hiring Starting in 2023. While other companies have only reported hiring freezes or slowdowns, most have avoided using the term “layoffs.” If Meta’s restructuring leads to layoffs, the company will be the first of the major tech giants to do so since the economic downturn began.

Reuters contributed to this report