Meta lays off employees across teams including WhatsApp and Instagram

Meta has started laying off employees across its teams, the Facebook parent company confirmed to Euronews Next in a statement, adding that the changes are made to reallocate company resources. 

“Today, a few teams at Meta are making changes to ensure resources are aligned with their long-term strategic goals and location strategy,” Meta told Euronews Next in a statement on Thursday. 

“This includes moving some teams to different locations, and moving some employees to different roles. In situations like this when a role is eliminated, we work hard to find other opportunities for impacted employees”. 

Employees working at Instagram, Reality Labs, and WhatsApp were affected by the layoffs, according to the Verge, which cited people familiar with the matter. 

Meta did not reply to questions about whether jobs in Europe would be impacted. 

Meta’s roadmap

Mark Zuckerberg’s company is focusing on a new era of smart glasses and its artificial intelligence (AI) models, which it showed off at its developers conference in September. 

The new round of layoffs comes off the back of similar reconstructing plans that saw a small series of job cuts earlier this year when Meta’s Reality Labs was split into Wearables and Metaverse organisations. 

Meta laid off 11,000 employees in 2022, following over-optimism about the company’s growth.

Meta enjoyed a financial boost during pandemic lockdowns as restrictions saw more people using their phones at home. 

But as the lockdowns ended and people started going outside again, revenue growth began to falter.

Last year, Meta announced a further 10,000 employees would be laid off.