Meta is Reportedly Laying Off 5% Of Its Workforce

Meta is planning a wave of performance-based job cuts that will reportedly impact around 5% of the company’s workforce (via Bloomberg). Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news in an internal memo sent to employees earlier this week, but the exec said that eliminated positions may be backfilled later this year.

“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster,” Zuckerberg wrote in the memo. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025.”

Employees affected by the layoffs will start to be notified on February 10 and get “generous severance in line with what we provided with previous cuts.” Zuckerberg also said that 2025 is going to be an “intense year” for Meta as the company continues to work on “AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media.”

Meta isn’t the only company to announce performance-based job cuts in the first month of 2025: Microsoft also announced similar job cuts last week, and the company followed up this week with a separate round of layoffs impacting employees working on security, experiences and devices, sales, and gaming.

For Meta, these staff reductions are also happening during a highly political moment. Last week, Zuckerberg made headlines when he announced big changes to encourage “more speech” on the company’s platform. In short, Meta will replace its third-party fact-checking program with a crowdsourced Community Notes system starting in the US. The company is also bringing back civic content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while also removing restrictions on certain topics like immigration and gender.

If these changes announced by Zuckerberg have been controversial, to say the least, Meta appears to be in a position of power right now as its rival TikTok may shut down in the US on January 19. That’s unless its Chinese owner ByteDance agrees to sell its US operations to another company. TikTok is said to have around 170 million users in the US, and these people may have to look for alternative platforms unless the Biden administration or President-elect Donald Trump find a way to delay the US ban on the app.