Facebook owner Meta cuts corporate team in latest round of layoffs

NEW YORK, May 24 (Reuters) – Meta Platforms Inc ( META.O ), owner of Facebook, cut jobs across its business and operating units on Wednesday as it carried out its latest batch of a three-part round of layoffs, some of a plan announced in March to eliminate 10,000 roles.

Dozens of employees working in teams such as marketing, website security, enterprise engineering, program management, content strategy and corporate communications took to LinkedIn to announce their layoffs.

The social media giant also cut employees from its units with a focus on privacy and integrity, according to the LinkedIn posts.

Meta earlier this year became the first Big Tech company to announce a second round of mass layoffs, after showing more than 11,000 employees the door this fall. The cuts brought the company’s headcount down to roughly where it stood as of mid-2021, following a hiring spree that doubled its workforce since 2020.

The company’s shares closed marginally higher in a generally weaker market. They have more than doubled in value this year and are among the best performers in the S&P 500 index (.SPX), thanks to the cost savings and Meta’s focus on artificial intelligence.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March that most of the layoffs in the company’s second round would take place in three “moments” over several months, and would largely wrap up in May. Some smaller rounds could continue after that, he said.

Overall, the cuts have hit non-engineering roles the most, reinforcing the primacy of those who write the code at Meta. Zuckerberg has promised to restructure business teams “significantly” and return to a “more optimal relationship between engineers and other roles.”

Even amid cuts aimed specifically at technology teams, the company has most severely eliminated non-engineering roles such as content design and user experience research, according to executives who spoke at a company town hall after the latest round of layoffs in April.

About 4,000 employees lost their jobs in April, Zuckerberg said during the town hall, after a smaller attack on recruiting teams in March.

The social media company said on Wednesday that the latest cuts are likely to affect around 490 staff at its international headquarters in Dublin, or almost 20% of its Irish workforce.

Two top executives in key market India — director of marketing Avinash Pant and Saket Jha Saurabh, director and head of media partnerships — were also let go, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

The two executives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Meta’s layoffs followed months of slowing revenue growth amid high inflation and a pullback in digital advertising from the pandemic e-commerce boom.

The company has also poured billions of dollars into its metaverse-oriented Reality Labs unit, which is set to lose $13.7 billion in 2022, and a project to whip up the infrastructure to support artificial intelligence work.

Reporting by Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Kenneth Li and Mark Porter

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