Meta will cut 10,000 jobs and end about 5,000 remaining open positions, according to chief executive and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, in confirmation of new layoffs that have been subject to weeks of speculation on the part of analysts.
The company also will axe "lower-priority projects," Zuckerberg added, adding that he had "underestimated the indirect costs" associated with them.

The announcement comes just four months after Meta revealed that it was eliminating about 11,000 roles as the social networking giant pushes ahead with what it's calling a "year of efficiency." Combined, this means that Meta has effectively laid off — or plans to lay-off — roughly one-quarter of its workforce since the tail-end of last year.

Facebook's parent company said the new restructuring efforts will take off in its tech groups by April and business groups in May.

"It will take the end of the year for changes in some cases," Zuckerberg wrote in a memo posted online for public consumption. "International teams' timelines will be different, and local leaders will offer more details. Tough and no way around it."

In a separate filing with the SEC, Meta said it now expects full-year 2023 expenses to be in the range of $86 billion to $92 billion, lowering the figure from an earlier estimate that ran up to around $95 billion. Much of this is due to "cost-reduction measures" associated with the restructuring, including severance payouts.

Facebook will actually lift its hiring freeze on its groups once the current restructuring is over, said Zuckerberg.

But Zuckerberg did speak some internal analysis that isn't even done yet, but is showing early signs at this point that engineers who have started working in-person at Meta perform better than those who join remotely, perhaps an early indication of a toughening stance against remote work.

Flattening
As it pertains to what this may mean for actual "types of roles" and other "lower priority projects," Zuckerberg didn't really dig in, but yesterday, Meta revealed that it would wind down support for NFTs on both Facebook and Instagram to focus instead on other monetization efforts. Today, Zuckerberg again touched on the matter, in which he stated about the process of "flattening" various organizations and divisions within the corporation structure of Meta Platforms Inc.-it's going to make for a few lost layers of management.

He said, "It's understood that every layer in the hierarchy introduces latency and risk aversion in information flow and decision-making. Every manager will typically review work and smooth over some rough edges before forwarding it up the line. In our Year of Efficiency, we will flatten out our organization by eliminating a bunch of layers of management. As part of that, we will ask a number of managers to be individual contributors. We will also have individual contributors report into almost every level — not just the bottom — so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster.

Like in the case of its previously announced layoffs round in November, Zuckerberg quickly reminded everyone that it is building for the long-term with continued focus on AI and the metaverse. Indeed, while its pivot to the metaverse way back in 2021 has been viewed as a massive mis-step by many, an endeavor nowhere near ready go generate the kinds of rewards its shareholders might like, there is little to indicate that Zuckerberg's unwavering metaverse conviction will change anytime soon.

"Our single biggest investment is in making AI smarter and applying it to every one of our products," Zuckerberg wrote. "We have the infrastructure to do this at an unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it will enable will be amazing. Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to defining the future of social connection."