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- Mark Zuckerberg told staff he couldn't promise that Meta wouldn't carry out future layoffs, per WSJ.
- Since November, the company has announced plans to lay off 21,000 workers, or around 20% of staff.
- "I generally feel good about the position here," and Meta has no further cuts planned, Zuckerberg said.
Meta isn't ruling out the possibility of future layoffs, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff on Thursday, per The Wall Street Journal.
Since November, Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus — has announced plans to lay off around 21,000 workers, or more than 20% of its workforce. On Wednesday, the company started informing tech employees whether they'd been affected by the most recent round of cuts.
Zuckerberg addressed the layoffs at a virtual employee Q&A on Thursday and said it was hard to predict whether further cuts would be needed in 2024 and beyond.
"I generally feel good about the position here, but just given the volatility, I don't want to kind of promise that there won't be future things in the future," Zuckerberg said at the Q&A, per The Journal, which obtained a video of the call. "What I can say is that there's nothing that we're planning now, and if we do something, it'll be sort of on that time frame."
Per the report, Zuckerberg told staff that around 4,000 employees were affected by the cuts that started on Wednesday, part of a batch first announced last month that he said would ultimately impact around 10,000 staffers. Recruiting staff were told last month whether they'd lost their jobs, while staff in Meta's business divisions are set to find out next month.
"I wanted to front-load it as early in the year as possible," Zuckerberg told staff on Thursday, per The Journal. "It took a few months of planning to execute. We wanted to get the most painful thing out of the way first, and that's this."
The batch of layoffs announced this week was "always going to be the most difficult and controversial one," he added, per The Journal.
Insider previously reported that management roles were heavily impacted by the cuts, including large numbers of technical product managers. Some of the managers had received positive performance reviews shortly before they were laid off, according to messages posted in employee chats.
Roles affected by the cuts included user-experience research, product design, software engineering, and AI research science, Insider reported. Around 75% of Meta's information problems engineering team, which works on projects related to fact-checking, election misinformation chains, and problematic content, was cut, people familiar with the matter told The Journal.
As well as letting staff go, Meta is flattening the organization, including cutting some layers of management, as part of its "year of efficiency." Zuckerberg told staff on Thursday that future hiring would be done at a much slower rate, with total headcount expected to grow between 1% and 2% a year, per The Journal.