As if in competition with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg fires 11,000 Meta employees

In a single day, Mark Zuckerberg sends home 13% of Meta employees, the entity under which the main platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are run.

The oldest and (still) most influential social media company lost 11,000 of its roughly 87,000 global employees in a single day.

Facebook’s founder comes to publicly own up to firing thousands of “talented employees”. Mark Zuckerberg admits that the unfortunate outcome is the result of an error of judgement, alluding to spending a not insignificant portion of the company’s “treasury” on initiatives that have so far failed to deliver the desired results. Certainly, the virtual reality-based Metaverse project, which no one else seems impressed with, played a role.

Beyond the stinging layoff plan, Meta will continue to cut as much as possible from the budgets allocated to various projects, cut back on employee benefits, and cut back on non-essential real estate expenses. In other words, it’s pretty much done with the extravagant offices ordered on the Apple model, with Meta employees working more from home to make costs more efficient.

It’s unclear at this point how exactly the budget cuts will affect the company’s core operations, already, it’s pretty clear that the user experience isn’t exactly satisfying, with Facebook trying several tweaks that have proven to be under-tested, the results only adding to user frustration.

While terminated employees in the United States will receive severance pay, the “treatment” that employees in other parts of the world will receive may have far less regard for the inconvenience caused, especially if they were contracted through an intermediary, much easier to get rid of by terminating contractual relationships.