Meta's profits for the third quarter declined 52 percent, as compared to the period a year ago.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is planning to lay off thousands of employees this week, to scale back its workforce.
Wall Street Journal reports that the announcement can be expected as early as Wednesday.
The company in October said to have forecast a weak holiday quarter and significantly higher costs next year, wiping $67 billion off Meta's stock market value, adding to the loss of more than half a trillion dollars this year.
Meta's profits for the third quarter declined 52 percent, as compared to the period a year ago. Over the past year, the company's market value has declined to $600 billion.
Meta's latest report, detailed that as of September 30, it had approximately 87,000 employees worldwide that work across its various platforms, which consist of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg in June warned employees that the coming recession would lead to a reduction in engineering jobs by at least 30 percent at the social media company.
"In 2023, we're going to focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas. So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organisation than we are today," Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call in late October.
Earlier this month, Meta’s shareholder, Altimeter Capital Management wrote to Mark Zuckerberg that Meta needs to streamline by reducing jobs and capital expenditures, adding that it ramped up spending and pivoted to the metaverse as Meta has lost investor confidence.
Now with this announcement, Meta has joined the list of major Silicon Valley companies including Microsoft Corp, Twitter Inc, and Snap Inc who have announced job cuts recently due to rising interest rates, rising inflation, and the European energy crisis which have caused the global economy to slow down.
Over 3,000 Twitter staff members were dismissed last Thursday, according to messages obtained from some of the workers.
Some staff members said they were locked out of their company’s Slack and email accounts, late Thursday, the evening before mass layoffs were due to be announced.
Twitter emailed staff Thursday saying layoffs would be announced at 9 a.m. PST on Friday, and that all the company's offices were being "temporarily closed."
The layoffs affected employees around the world, from the US, to the UK, and to Singapore. About 3,700 people were selected to be laid off — around 50% of Twitter's workforce, a medium, Insider, previously reported.