Meta announces more layoffs as it rolls back investment in web3 products

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has announced its second big round of mass redundancies, with plans to lay off another 10,000 workers by May 2023.  

In November, the tech giant announced the elimination of approximately 13% of its workforce, or 11,000 jobs, in the largest round of cuts in the company's history. Those have been already been carried out.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that this next round of job cuts will occur over the next few months, with "restructurings and layoffs" in tech groups in late April and business groups in late May.  

“For most of our history, we saw rapid revenue growth year after year and had the resources to invest in many new products. But last year was a humbling wake-up call. The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew, and our growth slowed considerably. We scaled back budgets, shrunk our real estate footprint, and made the difficult decision to lay off 13% of our workforce,” Zuckerberg wrote. 

“At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years. Higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation. Given this outlook, we'll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success.” 

Zuckerberg added the company will remain focused on its long-term vision and investments despite the challenges it faces. He explained Meta's financial plan would enable it to invest heavily in the future while delivering sustainable results by running every team more efficiently. 

Zuckerberg also added Meta's largest investment is in advancing artificial intelligence (AI) and building it into every one of its products, as well as in building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms. He claimed that the company's apps are growing and continuing to connect almost half of the world's population in new ways. 

“This work is incredibly important and the stakes are high. The financial plan we've set out puts us in position to deliver it. We have the opportunity to be bolder and make decisions that other companies can't,” said Zuckerberg. 

However, despite Zuckerberg’s promise of building and investing in the metaverse, Meta is ending its work on non-fungible tokens.

Stephane Kasriel, the commerce and fintech lead at Meta, announced on Monday via Twitter that the company will be ending its work with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Facebook and Instagram.  

According to Kasriel, this means that Meta will no longer be testing the ability to mint and sell NFTs on Instagram, nor will users be able to share NFTs on Instagram and Facebook in the coming weeks.

Some product news: across the company, we're looking closely at what we prioritize to increase our focus. We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses. ��[1/5]

— Stephane Kasriel (@skasriel) March 13, 2023

Meta reported a headcount of 87,314 in September 2022, with the layoffs bringing it down to around 66,000. Meta's core business has been hit by privacy changes by Apple, the rise of TikTok and advertisers tightening budgets amid recession fears.