Meta's latest job cuts bring its total layoffs to 21,000 in less than 4 months

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced on Tuesday that it is cutting 10,000 jobs, less than four months after it let go of 11,000 employees, bringing the total reported job losses in the company to a staggering 21,000.

"We expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to company staff.

This follows an earlier report in February that the social media giant whose headcount has steadily climbed for nearly two decades is preparing for a fresh round of mass layoffs and scaling down some leadership roles into lower-level roles as it looks to cut costs and flatten the layers of management.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg had said in an earnings call in February that the company will continue to cut costs to bring in his supposed ‘year of efficiency’, and promised cost cuts of $5 billion in expenses to between $89 billion and $95 billion.

The new development underpins its effort to rein in operating losses as it struggles with a slowing advertisement market, an unyielding Metaverse investment and an overall deteriorating post-pandemic economy that has brought about a series of mass job cuts across several big tech organisations including Microsoft, Alphabet, SAP, IBM, Spotify, Amazon, Philips, Salesforce and others.

According to the layoffs tracking site Layoffs.fyi, the tech industry has laid off more than 280,000 workers since the start of 2022, with about 40% of them happening this year.