Facebook parent company Meta plans to lay off another 10,000 employees

(CNN) – Facebook parent Meta plans to lay off another 10,000 workers, marking the tech giant’s second round of big job cuts in four months.

The latest layoffs, announced Tuesday, come after Meta said in November it would cut about 13% of its workforce, about 11,000 jobs, in the largest round of cuts in the company’s history.

“Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by about 10,000 people and close an additional 5,000 opportunities that we haven’t yet filled,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Tuesday.

As of September 2022, Meta had 87,314 employees, according to a statement of values. With the 11,000 workforce cuts announced in November and the 10,000 announced on Tuesday, Meta’s workforce will be reduced to about 66,000 employees.

Meta is by no means the only big tech company to have suffered layoffs in the context of inflation, recession, and pandemic demand. In the first few months of this year, Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, and Microsoft all confirmed massive job cuts affecting tens of thousands of tech workers.

Meta shares were up more than 4% in early trading Tuesday after the announcement.

When the first round of job cuts was announced in November, Zuckerberg blamed himself at the time for the company’s hiring surge early in the pandemic. Meta nearly doubled its workforce between March 2020 and September last year, as the covid-19 crisis created a surge in demand for digital services.

But the tide turned for the social media giant and other tech companies last year as pandemic restrictions eased and people returned to their offline lives. Meta’s core business has also been affected by privacy changes made by Apple and by advertisers cutting budgets amid recession fears.

In its most recent quarterly earnings report, Meta reported a sharp drop in earnings and its third consecutive quarterly decline in revenue. However, during a presentation of the results, Zuckerberg promised investors that 2023 would be the “year of efficiency” for the company, after years of heavy investment in growth and a more inclusive version of the Internet called Metaverse.

On that call, Zuckerberg also suggested that more downsizing might be imminent.

“We closed out last year with some tough layoffs and restructuring of some teams. And when we did, I made it clear that it was the beginning of our focus on efficiency, not the end,” Zuckerberg said during the earnings call in early February. He added that the company will focus on “flattening out” its organizational structure and “removing some layers of middle management for faster decision-making.”

“As part of this, we’ll be more proactive about cutting projects that don’t work or that don’t matter anymore, but my main goal is to increase the efficiency of how we implement our top priorities,” Zuckerberg said.