• by Colin Kirkland , May 24, 2023

In line with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's “Year of Efficiency,” Meta is continuing to restructure its organization to save money. On Wednesday, the tech giant began its most recent round of mass layoffs, which are estimated to impact 6,000 people.

This includes around 490 employees at Meta’s international headquarters in Dublin -- 20% of its Irish workforce -- and two top executives in India, Director of Marketing Avinash Pant and director and Head of Media Partnerships Saket Jha Saurabh.

After cutting 11,000 jobs in November, Zuckerberg announced in a blog post that the company would cut an additional 10,000 people and close around 5,000 open roles across two rounds of layoffs in late April and late May.

As of now, Meta has eliminated around 21,000 people from its organization -- which translates to a quarter of the company’s global employee base since November.

While the company's April layoffs primarily affected tech teams, this most recent round -- which began Wednesday -- targets business roles.

“As I've talked about efficiency this year, I've said that part of our work will involve removing jobs,” Zuckerberg wrote in his March blog post. “And that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long term vision.”

This vision centers around advancing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and building them into every Meta product alongside continuous efforts to invest in building out the metaverse and further developing its virtual-reality hardware.

Zuckerberg also said in March that reducing Meta’s workforce has helped speed up operations, adding that he “underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects.” Meta’s Year of Efficiency, he stated, is focused on canceling these types of projects as well as projects that are redundant.

The company's reorganization efforts, according to Zuckerberg, are happening due to “the new economic reality”––including waning revenue growth due to inflation and a digital ad rollback from the pandemic e-commerce boom -- but it is also public knowledge that Meta spent a whopping $13.7 billion on its VR division Reality Labs last year alone.

If the plan Zuckerberg laid out in March holds true, this should be Meta’s last round of layoffs for some time to come.