Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Meta, put a stop to the company’s recruiting of engineers and low-level data scientists in May.
Mr. Zuckerberg issued a warning to staff in July, telling them to brace themselves for a “intense phase” of 18 to 24 months, and he ordered managers to begin identifying underperforming individuals.
This week, he informed his staff that the firm would be placing a hiring freeze and cutting budgets across the majority of Meta’s teams, which would ultimately result in layoffs in areas of the business that had previously seen unfettered expansion.
It was the most recent hint that things were going to go wrong for the corporation that was once known as Facebook. Meta’s investors were wowed by the company’s ability to outperform its financial projections and bring in revenue year after year, thus the company continued to announce record growth. However, quarterly profit reports for this year have been less optimistic than in previous years. This is because Meta is dealing with disruptions in the global economy in addition to concerns from competitors and regulators.
The story of the employment freeze was made public by Bloomberg earlier on Thursday.
During Mr. Zuckerberg’s weekly question-and-answer session with staff, he made the news to those present. According to workers who were present at the meeting, Mr. Zuckerberg reportedly said that he needed to plan cautiously in order to account for a decrease in income at the firm. It had been requested that managers all throughout Meta decrease their budgets, either by not filling empty posts or by lowering the head counts of their current workforce.
This employee asked not to be named because employees were not authorised to speak to reporters. It was possible that the workers might be terminated from their positions at the corporation if they were unable to find work on other teams.
Meta did not want to comment on the matter, but a business spokeswoman directed a reporter to statements that Mr. Zuckerberg had made in the public forum back in July.
During a call with investors to discuss the company’s profits in July, Mark Zuckerberg shared with them “Our aim is to slowly limit head count growth over the following year.”
Since the beginning of the year, Meta has displayed signs of financial slowing as the company has made aggressive moves toward offering products for the developing metaverse. This is a sector that Mr. Zuckerberg believes will be the future of his company, despite the fact that it is still largely unproven.
Meta’s most recent quarterly report shows that the company’s revenue has decreased by one percent as compared to the same quarter in the prior fiscal year. Since the company went public ten years ago, this was the first time that the income of the social media behemoth has decreased.
The revenue for the quarter came in at $28.82 billion, which is lower than the $29.07 billion reported the previous year. The profit was $6.69 billion, which is a decrease of 36 percent from the previous year. According to statistics gathered by FactSet, experts on Wall Street had anticipated earnings of $7.04 billion on sales of $28.9 billion.