Facebook is learning the limits of growth. This is first noticeable in the turnover, but soon also in the number of employees and the size of the budget. CEO Zuckerberg announces a downsizing course to the workforce.
The Facebook group Meta is facing austerity measures after the slowdown in its business. Founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg prepared the employees for a hiring freeze and budget cuts in some areas in an internal question and answer session, as reported by the financial service Bloomberg, among others.
Meta will be smaller in 2023 than this year, Zuckerberg said. In the last quarter, Meta posted the first drop in sales since the Facebook group went public in 2012. The management referred, among other things, to concerns about the economy and inflation, which made advertisers more economical. He had hoped for further stabilization of the economy, Bloomberg quoted Zuckerberg as saying. But that hasn’t happened yet, which is why they now want to “plan something conservatively”.
At the same time, Facebook and Instagram are struggling with the competition from the video app Tiktok – and Apple’s measures to improve privacy protection on the iPhone also put the business model under pressure. At the same time, the focus on virtual worlds – the “metaverse” – entails development costs in the billions.
According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg said he had hoped that the economy would have stabilized more in the meantime. But since it doesn’t look like it, Meta wants to plan more carefully. There should be budget cuts across various areas. Meta had grown rapidly in recent years, including to meet security and hate speech filtering requirements. As of June 30, the group had 83,553 employees, compared to 63,404 a year earlier.
