Another day, another round of big changes at Meta: The parent company of Facebook and Instagram is cutting roughly 5% of its workforce — or 3,620 employees — as it looks to “move out low-performers faster,” according to a memo from CEO Mark Zuckerberg that was obtained by Bloomberg on Tuesday.
Zuckerberg said the cuts are coming after he “decided to raise the bar” on performance” at his company.
“This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams,” Zuckerberg said.
The 40-year-old Meta founder said employees who are laid off will be notified starting on February 10. Meta’s headcount at the end of September, the most recent period data is available for, was 72,404.
Zuckerberg’s memo on the job cuts adds to a busy start to 2025 for the company.
Notably, Meta ended its third-party fact checking operation last week, with Zuckerberg saying the move was about “restoring free expression” on Facebook and Instagram, where he said the fact checkers had made “too many mistakes” in recent years. Meta will be rolling out a new feature similar to X’s Community Notes, Zuckerberg said.
On Friday, Zuckerberg compared the fact checking operation to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984,” while appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast. He added the Biden Administration “basically pushed” the company to censor certain topics, including what the government felt was COVID-19 misinformation.
And in other Meta news, the company announced it was ending its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs on Friday.
Meta’s stock price is up 1.1% on the year to $596.27 per share.
