Meta announced its first round of layoffs in November last year when CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that 13 % employees of at the company would be laid off. Zuckerberg then made a similar announcement in March noting that the next round of layoffs would impact 10,000 employees globally.
Facebook’s parent company Meta implemented its latest round of layoffs this week, which has impacted employees working in its India operations across marketing, administration, human resources, and other verticals, Business Today has learned from sources.
“Current layoffs are part of the announcement made previously only. This time around layoffs were from admin, human resources, marketing, etc. This downsizing round was across the hierarchy, people at all levels have been impacted,” a person aware of the matter told Business Today.
An employee let go from Meta’s India operations on Thursday told Business Today that the company would provide three months’ pay as severance along with additional monetary support based on the duration of employment.
“Severance is similar to what laid-off employees received in previous rounds, roughly 3 months base pay. Apart from that there is pay depending on the duration of employment. There is also the option of health insurance extension,” the former employee noted.
Zuckerberg wrote in a note to his employees in March, “Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.”
As per SEC filings, the company’s Q1 FY 2023 revenue stood at $28.65 billion, an increase of 3 % year-over-year, and an increase of 6 per cent year-over-year on a constant currency basis.
The company also incurred expenses of $21.42 billion, up 10 per cent year-over-year. The uptrend in expenses was driven mostly by restructuring costs which included severance pay and other benefits paid to separated employees.
After announcing its quarterly financial results, the company said in a statement, “In 2022, we initiated several measures to pursue greater efficiency and to realign our business and strategic priorities. As of March 31, 2023, we have substantially completed the 2022 employee layoffs while continuing to assess facilities consolidation and data centre restructuring initiatives. We incurred additional pre-tax restructuring charges of $621 million in the first quarter of 2023.”
“In March 2023, we announced three rounds of planned layoffs to further reduce our company size by approximately 10,000 employees across the Family of Apps (FoA) and Reality Labs (RL) segments. In connection with these layoffs, we expect to incur total pre-tax severance and related personnel costs of approximately $1 billion, of which $523 million was recognized during the first quarter of 2023 and the remaining charges will be substantially recorded by the end of 2023,” Meta added.
