Facebook’s parent company Meta is laying off 11,000 employees

Facebook parent company Meta is laying off 11,000 people, about 13% of its workforce, as it grapples with faltering revenue and broader challenges in the tech industry, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a letter to employees on Wednesday.

The move comes just a week after mass layoffs at Twitter under new owner, billionaire Elon Musk.

Meta, like other social media companies, saw a financial boost during the pandemic lockdown era as more people stayed home and scrolled on their phones and computers. But when the lockdown ended and people started going out again, income growth started to slow down.

Slowing economic growth and a bleak outlook for online advertising — by far Meta’s biggest source of revenue — have contributed to Meta’s woes. This summer, Meta posted its first-ever drop in quarterly revenue, followed by another bigger drop in the fall.

Some of the challenges are company-specific, and some are related to broader economic and technological forces.

Last week, Twitter laid off about half of its 7,500 employees, part of a chaotic overhaul as Musk took the helm. He tweeted that he had no choice but to cut jobs “when the company is losing over $4 million a day,” though he did not provide details on the losses.

Meta has worried investors by investing more than $10 billion a year in the “meta universe” while taking its focus away from social media. CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicts that the metaverse, an immersive digital universe, will eventually replace smartphones as the primary way we use technology.

Meta and its advertisers are bracing for a potential recession. There’s also the issue of Apple’s privacy tools, which make it harder for social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Snap to track people without their consent and target ads to them.

Competition from TikTok is also a growing threat as young people flock to the video-sharing app over Instagram, which Meta also owns.