Facebook parent company, Meta, laying off more than 11,000 employees

The parent company of Facebook is slashing about 13% of its workforce.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter to employees, announced the layoffs of about 11,000 people, citing sinking revenue and other issues in the tech industry, The Associated Press reported.

Zuckerberg said that the company will be “leaner and more efficient,” The Hill reported. It will do so by cutting discretionary spending and extending a hiring freeze through the first quarter of 2023.

The cuts come a week after Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter and laid off about half of its workforce, the AP reported. But other tech companies have also announced layoffs after they increased the number of employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lyft also cut about 13% of its workers, The Wall Street Journal reported. Stripe, an online payments processor, also cut about 1,000 jobs recently.

Amazon has instituted a hiring freeze that is expected to last the “next few months,” Forbes reported.

Zuckerberg’s Meta was one of the companies that boosted the number of positions, expecting the tech sector to continue growing once the pandemic eased.

“Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected,” Zuckerberg said in a statement, according to the AP. “Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”

Investors are now looking at the decision-making by Meta, which has tried to move away from social media and into the “metaverse” where it has invested more than $10 billion.

Zuckerberg expects that the immersive digital universe will take over smartphones as the default way that people use technology.

For the employees who have been laid off, they will get 16 weeks of base pay with two additional weeks of pay for every year they worked for Meta. Their health insurance will continue for six months and they will get paid for any unused paid time off, Forbes reported.