It looked like I could grab the apple. Jason Lawrence, a Google researcher, was sitting across from me, holding the fruit in his hand. I could see it, it was red and shiny, and my brain was telling me it was right there. But Lawrence and the apple were actually in another room — they were just being projected in front of me through Google’s Project Starline.
Meta’s reportedly planning to lay off ‘thousands’ of workers this week
Meta’s planning major job cuts that could affect “thousands” of workers, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Sources familiar with the situation told the WSJ that the layoffs could begin as soon as Wednesday.
The Facebook and Instagram parent company reported over 87,000 employees at the end of September, but these “large-scale” layoffs are expected to slash a significant portion of staff members. According to the WSJthe layoffs could hit Meta even harder than the mass job cuts at Twitter, which affected about half of the company’s 7,500-employee workforce.
Meta declined to comment on the situation but pointed The Verge to Zuckerberg’s statement during the company’s earnings call last month. “In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” Zuckerberg said. “So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
Although Zuckerberg says Facebook has more active users than ever before, investors are still concerned about the company’s pricey bet on the metaverse. Meta’s virtual reality arm lost $3.7 billion this past quarter and a total of $9.4 billion this year, while the company’s stock is trading at its lowest price since 2016.
