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Meta are laying off over 11,000 staff, including some Reality Labs employees"I view layoffs as a last resort," says Zuck
“I view layoffs as a last resort,” says Zuck
More than 11,000 workers at Meta will lose their jobs, the technology company has announced, a figure that includes some staff working in its VR team Reality Labs. The Company Formerly Known As Facebook broke the bad news to employees via amessageCEO Mark Zuckerberg shared earlier today. The job losses equate to 13% of Meta’s entire staff. Redundancies will affect staff across Meta’s global offices, including here in the UK.
The possibilities of the metaverseWatch on YouTube
The possibilities of the metaverse
Instead, Zuckerberg attributed the cuts to his own “wrong” predictions on how the company’s ecommerce revenue growth would continue to grow after the pandemic. He said he “made the decision to significantly increase our investments” off the back of that prediction, but, “Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected,” he admitted.
While I’m deeply sympathetic to the employees who are losing their jobs during one of the worst economic crises in living memory, I’m not entirely surprised that Meta is restructuring. Reality Labs' chief financial officer David Wehner said in Meta’smost recent financial resultsfor this year that the VR team’s operating losses would “grow significantly year-over-year in 2023”, for example. The whole Metaverse is a concept I find extremely dubious at best, and laughably bereft of any real merit at worst. I mean,legs. Just legs.
Meta’s huge layoffs are the latest woe to befall big tech companies that affects offshoots of the games industry. Back in September, Googleannouncedsuddenly that they were shutting down their Stadia streaming service, which came as asurpriseto the developers who were still working on games for it.
