Meta Platforms has decided to lay off 10,000 employees and halt hiring for around 5,000 additional open roles, in its second round of significant staff cuts in recent months.
These layoffs and reduced hiring goals raise questions regarding the Facebook parent company’s Canadian expansion plans. Less than a year ago, Meta made a commitment to hire up to 2,500 people across Canada over the next five years as part of a new engineering hub opened in Toronto to support its metaverse development efforts.
When asked how these moves will affect the company’s Canadian operations and employee growth goals, a Meta spokesperson declined to provide further comment.
Eight months later, after posting its slowest revenue growth since going public in 2012, Meta shed 11,000 employees in a round of staff cuts that impacted an undisclosed number of the firm’s Canadian employees.
It remains unclear how Meta’s latest layoffs and scaled-back hiring strategy will impact the firm’s Canadian expansion plans, or how many Meta employees in Canada stand to be affected by this latest round of layoffs.
When asked how these moves will affect the company’s Canadian operations and employee growth goals, a Meta spokesperson declined to provide further comment.
However, when reached for comment in November, a Meta spokesperson reiterated the firm’s commitment to Canada, telling BetaKit: “Our expansion in Canada was always a long-term one planned over a number of years. We remain committed to Canada and look forward to many years of innovation ahead in Toronto.”
With offices in Toronto and Montréal, Meta currently has a Canadian workforce of about 1,900 people, according to the company’s LinkedIn page—an increase from 1,800 in November.
Despite disclosing plans to cut 21,000 employees from its overall workforce in recent months, Meta continues to spend billions developing metaverse-related technologies. Meta’s Canadian operations focus in part on this, and the company has previously said that it expects its Toronto hub to play an important role in the creation of Meta’s metaverse.
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While Meta’s spokesperson declined to provide comment about Canadian hiring plans, they instead directed BetaKit to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement.
Meta’s latest cuts come as part of what Zuckerberg described as the company’s “year of efficiency” in a March 13 letter shared with employees and published on the firm’s website. “At this point, I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years,” wrote Zuckerberg.
“Higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation,” Zuckerberg added. “Given this outlook, we’ll need to operate more efficiently than our previous headcount reduction to ensure success.”
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In addition to these cuts, Meta also plans to cancel lower-priority projects and reduce its hiring rates. Affected members of Meta’s recruiting team will be let go tomorrow, impacted tech employees will be informed in late April, and members of the business group will be notified in May. Meta noted that some layoffs may take until the end of 2023 to execute.
As BetaKit has previously reported, Canadian employees continue to feel the effects of mass layoffs at Big Tech firms like Meta, Salesforce, Twitter, and Amazon. These companies are far from alone in shedding staff as macroeconomic conditions have worsened. According to Layoffs.fyi, over 1,500 firms globally—including a growing number of Canadian tech startups—have laid off 290,000 employees since the beginning of 2022.
In an SEC filing, Meta said it expects its full-year 2023 expenses to be in the range of $86 billion USD to $92 billion with these layoffs, down from $89 billion to $95 billion. These figures include restructuring costs of approximately $3 billion to $5 billion.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Dima Solomin.