Mark Zuckerberg gives a "my bad," lays off 11,000 employees across Meta

Twitter isn’t the only social media giant to be severing huge amounts of its workforce. In an email sent to employees across Meta (i.e. Facebook and Instagram), CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company will be laying off 13 percent of its global workforce, or 11,000 employees. The Facebook founder says he takes full responsibility for the recent downturn of the company, as recent investments have not paid off for the tech mogul.

“Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history,” Zuckerberg writes in the email, per The Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”

Zukerberg not only blames the layoffs on increased competition and a downturn in ad revenue but his own misfires in investments at the start of the pandemic.

“At the start of COVID, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments,” Zuckerberg continues. “Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. 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.”

Moving forward into 2023, Zuckerberg says Meta’s plan is to greatly slow down recruitment—particularly in the Reality Labs division—which focuses on the metaverse. This particular sector of the company reported $3.67 billion in operating losses, as Zuck learned the hard way that no one gives a shit about having legged avatars in a lackluster virtual reality simulator.

The company’s buy-in to virtual reality has yet to pay off as it fails to draw in new users, and in fact, contributes to Meta’s tanking value. The newest Meta VR space, called Horizon Worlds, has only brought in 200,000 users worldwide—and that’s a good turnout. Per Wall Street Journal, internal documents at Meta show that only 9 percent of created worlds bring in more than 50 users, and many remain completely barren.

Meta’s mass layoff comes at a time when many social media companies are facing major dips in growth and revenue for the first time since their creation. Elon Musk christened his first day at Twitter by laying off 50 percent of its staff. And earlier this year, Snap laid off 20 percent of its staff and announced internal restructuring. For now, they will continue to try to extract as much of our attention from us as possible, but it’s proving to have its limits.