Gateway:Recent events
== Facebook owner Meta lays off 11,000 employees after state income falls ==
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is cutting 11,000 jobs, more than one in eight employees, after a devastating drop in revenue has left the company behind Facebook overstaffed and "inefficient," the chief executive said in a note to employees. .
However, Zuckerberg indicated that he planned to continue with the company's controversial multibillion-dollar bet on virtual reality, adding that the Metaverse project was a "high priority development area".
The first round of redundancies in the company's history comes after its workforce reached 87,314 this year.
In the note on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said that Meta had invested more at the start of COVID, banking that online activity will continue to grow and [[coronavirus[1]|coronavirus]] will accelerate even after the pandemic ends.
He added, "Unfortunately, it didn't go the way I expected." “Not only has online commerce reverted to earlier trends, but our revenue has dropped much lower than I expected due to the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and the loss of ads. I got it wrong and I take responsibility for it."
The reference to "signal loss" is thought to be related to Zuckerberg's long-running dispute with Apple over 2021 limits on the amount of data, or "signals", Facebook can collect about iPhone users' behavior. Is. That disadvantage, Zuckerberg has regularly said, makes it difficult for small businesses to use Facebook ads to gain new customers profitably.
Zuckerberg's note said the company is offering US employees severance pay starting at 16 weeks, as well as six months of health care support. Those on immigrant visas would get help from "dedicated immigration specialists", but Zuckerberg acknowledged the cuts were "especially hard if you're here on a visa".
Despite widespread criticism of Zuckerberg for the scale of his investment on the company's virtual reality project, which has resulted in more than $10bn (£8.7bn) being spent on research and development each quarter, he insisted in the note that Pivot remained a "high-priority growth area", alongside the company's TikTok-style "AI discovery engine" and its ads and commercial platforms.
Instead, Zuckerberg pointedly pointed a finger at Apple's privacy changes, saying that the loss of data was one of the factors affecting Meta's revenue.
Meta's share price peaked at $379 in September 2021, shortly after the Apple system was rolled out to all iPhone users. However, the months that followed were one grim revelation after another, from a quarterly earnings report that demonstrated the immediate pitfalls of change, to a damning set of leaks from whistleblower Frances Haugen and the company's biggest global outage in years.
Even its rebranding in October 2021, from Facebook to Meta, could not halt the downward trend, and the company experienced the biggest drop in its share price in January this year, a third in less than four weeks. fell over. It now sits below $100, its lowest level since early 2016.
Meta has struggled as investors resist Zuckerberg's costly dive into creating a vast AI metaverse as digital advertising -- the company's main engine of revenue -- slows.
"Mark Zuckerberg's 'Maya is criminal' statement is unlikely to do the trick to reassure investors, instead making them more jittery with his admission," said Susannah Streeter, investment analyst at Hargreaves Lansdowne. Underestimated."
Streeter noted that the focus for Meta will be driving revenue – a "monumental task" – with young users "dancing to the tunes of TikTok's Pied Piper, or setting up groups and channels on Discord and Telegram".
“At the same time meta funds are being pumped into the dark plumbing of the metaverse, and it is extremely unclear when revenue will emerge from this costly venture.”
The scale of the redundancies is massive, but pales in proportion to the chaotic dismissals at Twitter, where Elon Musk led a company-wide effort to cut the workforce by 50% in just a few weeks. Musk's acrimonious job loss was almost immediately hit with allegations of employment law violations including insufficient notice and failure to ensure that the ax was wielded equitably.
"The Twitter scandal has lowered the bar enough that it will now be easier for Meta and other employers to refine and humanize their redundancy processes," said Charlie Thomson, an employment law expert at Stewarts.
“Many of these organizations will offer exit packages to redundant employees in exchange for potential claims settlements, which may academicize alleged errors in the counseling process to some degree. There is a cost. And if an employer harasses their employees enough, they may prefer to sue the settlement."
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