Hundreds of British Facebook staff fear sack in huge jobs cull
HUNDREDS of Facebook’s staff in the UK are facing the sack after parent company Meta said it was laying off 11,000 employees.
Boss Mark Zuckerberg, 38, apologised for ‘getting it wrong’ after workers at the social media giant were informed about the cuts in a company-wide email at 11am yesterday.
Mr Zuckerberg said he had decided to reduce the size of the workforce by around 13 per cent. The move could mean 650 job losses in the UK. Facebook’s UK employee headcount swelled from 3,745 in 2020 to 5,148 in 2021, with the vast majority based in London.
Meta said it would pay 16 weeks of basic pay to those affected in the US plus two additional weeks for every year of service and all remaining paid time off as a part of a severance package. The company said the arrangements would be similar elsewhere.
It is the first major jobs cut in Meta’s 18-year history.
Mr Zuckerberg said: ‘Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.’
He said the company was overstaffed because he had been overly optimistic about growth.
Meta’s share value has tumbled from more than £870 billion to less than £250 billion this year, over concerns about massive spending on its ‘Metaverse’ vanity project and the ever-present threat of regulation.
The company believes Metaverse will be the next big frontier of the technology industry. Mr Zuckerberg has funnelled more than £31 billion into the project that many consider to be failing. He has subsequently seen more than £26 billion of those funds evaporate in a matter of months, while his net worth – which is largely tied to his company’s valuation – was reported to have fallen by £77 billion.
It comes as thousands of Twitter employees found they had been locked out of their work laptops after they were culled in mass sackings by new owner Elon Musk.
Mr Musk, who recently bought Twitter for £38 billion, is thought to have sacked around 3,700 workers, and one of his first actions was to purge the executive board.
US employees who were sent emails to their personal accounts, advising them they were out of work, have launched a class action against Mr Musk, claiming the sackings were carried out without enough notice.
Hundreds of UK staff are thought to be seeking legal advice about a similar move.
‘Increased competition’