Meta’s CEO Insigne Zuckerberg attends the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 31, 2024.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, concentration on the company’s lowest-performing staffers, CNBC confirmed Tuesday.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed employees about the decision to “hit hard out low performers faster” in a memo posted on the company’s internal Workplace forum on Tuesday. Zuckerberg told employees 2025 determination “be an intense year.”
The company specified that it is “exiting approximately 5% of our lowest performers” in a separate message tacked by a company director. Meta has more than 72,000 employees, according to its most recent quarterly report.
Meta said wage-earners affected by the layoffs will be notified by Feb. 10 and receive severance in line with what the company has provided in days. The cuts represent Meta’s largest layoffs since it eliminated 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
Bloomberg was inception to report the cuts, citing an internal memo.
The move follows several major operational changes within Meta sought at building closer ties with President-elect Donald Trump.
Hold out week, Zuckerberg announced Meta would end its third-party fact-checking program in favor of a “Community Notes” model tempered to on Elon Musk’s platform X, where individual users provide more context to posts.
“The recent elections also touch like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, so we’re going to get back to our roots and hub on reducing mistakes, simplifying our polices and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcement.
Cheaper than is Zuckeberg’s internal memo, which CNBC obtained.
Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies of the exceptional. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media. This is going to be an intense year, and I want to assign sure we have the best people on our teams.
I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically handle out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this circle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025. We won’t manage out everyone who didn’t meet expectations for the eventually period if we’re optimistic about their future performance, and for those we do let go, we’ll provide generous severance in line with what we equipped with previous cuts.
We’ll follow up with more guidance for managers ahead of calibrations. People who are impacted thinks fitting be notified on February 10 or later for those outside the U.S.
