Zuckerberg announces budget and staff cuts: "Meta will be smaller in 2023"

For the first time Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and co-founder of Facebook, now Meta, presented a plan to reorganize the company's teams and, for the first time ever, to cut jobs. 

In a communication to employees, reported by Bloomberg, the chief executive announced the freeze on hiring and the restructuring - with probable mergers - of some teams to cut expenses and realign priorities.

Thus, he said, Meta (the company that includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) will likely be smaller in 2023. He is not known whether cuts and downsizing also affect employees outside the United States.

Zuckerberg also added that the company will cut budgets for most teams, even those in growing industries.

"I had hoped that the economy would stabilize - said Zuckerberg - but from what we are seeing it still doesn't seem to be so, so we want to plan a little cautiously.

The CEO, who has just announced a new arrival in the family - a girl, third after Max and August - spoke of the economic problems that led to the decision.

In the first 18 years of the company - said the CEO during the meeting on Thursday with the staff - we have grown rapidly practically every year, but then recently our revenues have been flat or slightly declining for the first time. " . 

Meta had more than 83,500 employees as of June 30 and added 5,700 new hires in the second quarter.

The company announced earlier this year that it was planning to slow hiring for some managerial roles and had deferred the distribution of full-time jobs to summer interns. 

In July, Zuckerberg reiterated that Meta would "steadily reduce staff growth" and reassign resources: internal priorities include Reels (Meta's TikTok competitor) and the Metaverse. 

Meta is not the only company aiming at downsizing due to the economic crisis: even Twitter - much smaller and struggling with the purchase offer, then withdrawn, of Elon Musk - announced the blocking of hiring in May and asked employees to keep an eye on their expenses and reduce travel and marketing costs. 

Google - another tech giant - also announced it would slow hiring during the second half of the year, while in August Snap (from the Snapchat app, competing with TikTok) cut 20% of its workforce.