After a decade of explosive growth, the company formerly known as Facebook is planning to trim down. Bloomberg reports that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to freeze hiring and restructure some groups within the company Thursday in an internal all-hands call.
According to Bloomberg, Meta plans to shrink budgets widely within the company, including to teams that it was recently investing in. Meta has thrown a lot of weight behind VR and creating its own metaverse in recent months and is also scrambling to build out short-form video products, like Reels, that can compete with TikTok.
Meta is far from the only tech company downsizing at the moment, but a hiring freeze still signals relatively dire times for the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. While many companies in tech are battening down the hatches at the moment given a worsening global economic outlook, Meta is also grappling with fresh threats to its advertising business, most notably from iOS privacy changes implemented by Apple last year.
Zuckerberg signaled that the company was in for leaner times back in July, noting in an internal meeting that his company was approaching one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and would slow hiring to prepare. Meta already selectively paused hiring within certain organizations in the company, but the universal hiring freeze marks a new era.
“I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” Zuckerberg said in the internal call this summer. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
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