- Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing workers, CNBC confirmed Tuesday.
- CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed employees about the decision to “move out low performers faster” in a memo posted on the company’s internal Workplace forum on Tuesday.
- Zuckerberg told employees 2025 will “be an intense year.”
Meta plans to lay off approximately 5% of its workforce, targeting the company’s lowest-performing employees, CNBC confirmed Tuesday.
The decision to “move out low performers faster” was announced in a memo by the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, that was posted to the company’s internal Workplace forum on Tuesday. Zuckerberg told employees that 2025 will “be an intense year.”
The company wrote in a separate note posted by a director that it was “exiting approximately 5% of our lowest performers.” Meta has over 72,000 workers, according to its latest quarterly report.
Meta said employees impacted by the layoffs would be notified by Feb. 10 and would be offered severance consistent with what the company offered in the past. The cuts are Meta’s largest round of layoffs since it cut a total of 21,000 jobs, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.
The cuts were first reported by Bloomberg, which cited an internal memo.
The changes come just weeks after significative operational measures within Meta related to its efforts to forge closer relations with president-elect Donald Trump.
Last week, Zuckerberg said that Meta would be shutting down its third-party fact-checking program and transitioning to a “Community Notes” model similar to that used on Elon Musk’s platform X, where individual users add more context to posts.
“The recent elections also seem to me like a cultural tipping point back towards speech and for us to get back to our roots around reducing mistakes, simplifying polices and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcement.
Here’s Zuckeberg’s internal memo, which CNBC obtained.
We do a lot of the foundational technology of the world. AI, glasses as next computing platform and future of social media. It’s going to be a busy year, and I want to get the best people on teams.
I’ve taken the decision to raise the bar on performance management and get low performers out quicker. We normally manage out people who aren’t hitting the mark over the course of a year, but now, we’re going to do some more extensive performance-based performance cuts in this cycle, with the intent to back fill these roles in 2025. If we are hopeful about their future performance, we won’t necessarily manage out everybody who fell below expectations this last period, and even for those who we do manage out, we will offer generous severance that will be roughly aligned with what we provided with previous rounds of cuts.
We’ll follow up with manager guidance ahead of calibrations. Those impacted will be informed on Feb 10 or later and for those outside the U.S.
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