Facebook owner Meta has cut around 5,000 team members in its third round of layoffs since November of 2022, according to a report from uploadVR.
November’s headcount reduction was the largest, with 11,000 employees leaving Meta, followed by 4,000 in February. These latest cuts bring the total to around 20,000 job losses over the past six months at the company.
It is reported that the cuts have included at least two policy managers from Reality Labs, Meta’s AR/VR division. These cuts come just weeks before Apple is expected to unveil its first entry into the AR/VR space with the “Apple Reality Pro” headset at WWDC‘s keynote on June 5. However, there do not appear to have been engineering cuts in the current round. Affected Meta employees received an email notification at 5 a.m. Pacific time on May 24, in what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has coined his “Year of Efficiency”.
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Meta now employs around 65,000 people, down from a high of about 85,000 in Q3 of 2022, blaming declining advertising spending given the macroeconomic conditions and increased competition from TikTok. Advertising revenues at Meta also took a hit when Apple increased privacy and limited app tracking in iOS 14, making it much more difficult for advertisers to remarket to users who had previously seen off-platform advertising.
Layoffs everywhere but Apple
Meta is not the only tech giant making layoffs, with Google owner Alphabet cutting 12,000 roles, Microsoft 10,000, and Amazon 27,000 this year alone. Apple, however, has avoided large numbers of cuts, with just a tiny number of corporate retail team members being laid off. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told CNBC, “I view that as a last resort and, so, mass layoffs are not something we’re talking about at this moment.”
